The art of bowling is to make it all seem very innocuous. Yuvraj Singh does that brilliantly with his looped spinners. In the reigning confusion over whether to attempt a six or a four, batsmen seem to get into an indecisive stupor only to knock the ball tamely back at India’s emerging ODI all-rounder or his 10 henchmen.
It can’t be all that bad for Yuvi to end up as the first left-arm spinner to take five wickets in a World Cup match while also becoming the first to do the double of five wickets and a half century. When his mind is free of clutter, he is capable of all this and much more.
ODI bowling is not rocket science. It’s a matter of trying out all kinds of little variations as Shane Warne used to.
The tubby leggie found a kind of artistic freedom in the limited-overs game as opposed to the rigours of Test cricket in which he had to play virtual chess with his opponents with a constancy of line and length the basic requirement.
Yuvi’s variations may not be the most subtle though he does find a range of them amidst all those long arms and legs coming through like the rotating parts of a windmill, very much in the awkward way expected of tall men who bowl spin. He does manage to loop the ball a bit and make it land in different spots on the pitch, all the time dangling his offerings like giveaways at festival time.
You can’t accuse him of being a pie thrower as Kevin Pietersen may have done once famously. Yuvi got under the batsman’s skin so much that it has become a nightmare for KP to face any left arm spinner. A quick-thinking Graeme Smith brought on Peterson first thing with the new ball at KP who did not last long enough to work out what he really thinks of Yuvi and other such left arm spinners.
Like golfers drive for fun and putt for money, Yuvi likes to bowl to pick up confidence in his batting. He can look the picture when he is on song.
There was one drive to cover that fetched only one run as there was a fielder on the fence. It was a stroke of confidence, the ball a veritable bullet fired off a gun held in a nerveless hand. He can bat, this lad.
It’s no more a question of whether Yuvi will ever go on to justify the time spent in trying to make him a top class Test performer. More pertinent is what the seasoned batsman can do for India’s World Cup campaign. As a limited-overs player of repute, he is far more valuable in this area.
There was a chance that he would become a great cricketer. That time has passed. But he is not yesterday’s man yet. The ODI arena represents his best chance to continue to flirt with greatness as it offers greater scope for him to get over his starting yips. We saw how he did that with bat and ball against Ireland, his bowling symbolic of a native cricketing intelligence. Team India needs guys like him to pull their weight in the great battles that would begin in the World Cup knockouts.