Ravichandran Ashwin: The 500 Blows

When it finally happened, it all happened rather swiftly. To begin only his second over of the ongoing Rajkot Test, Ravichandran Ashwin approached England opener Zak Crawley from round the wicket. The ball pitched on the partial rough outside the right hander’s leg stump, which Crawley tried to sweep at but only ended up inducing a top-edge, which was safely caught by Rajat Patidar at short fine-leg. And just like that, the great Indian off-spinner had claimed his 500^th Test wicket, receiving a standing ovation from the fans at the Niranjan Shah Stadium and hugs from his teammates below. The long wait for the milestone had ended in all of seven balls.

The reason, or reasons, Ashwin was stuck on 499 Test wickets for 10 excruciating days had little to do with him or his spinning palm: an in-form Jasprit Bumrah had cleaned up the English tail to end the second Test in Visakhapatnam, a nine-day break was scheduled between the second and third Tests and when the series eventually resumed in Rajkot on February 15, Rohit Sharma won the toss and chose to bat on a flat track.

But so confident was Ravindra Jadeja, one half of India’s most successful bowling combination in Test history, that his long-time partner-in-crime would promptly get to the big landmark when it was his turn with the ball that he, on the eve of the game, even congratulated Ashwin in present tense: “To achieve this milestone, to complete 500 Test wickets, is a very big thing and I am very happy for him.” Jadeja’s certainty could’ve also been based on the fact that since Ashwin’s Test debut in New Delhi back in 2011, the modern-day legend from Tamil Nadu has failed to pick a first innings wicket while playing at home on only three occasions; that’s three times in 56 first innings’s spread over nearly 13 years. Just 1.1 overs into Ashwin’s Rajkot spell, Jadeja was proved right.

Thus, Ashwin became only the second Indian bowler to get to the 500-wicket mark in Tests, after Anil Kumble. But just as importantly, he also became the second quickest in the history of the sport after fellow off-spinner and the greatest wicket-taker of all time in Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan. While Muralitharan got there in 87 Tests, Rajkot marks Ashwin’s 98^th long-format appearance for the country. Even though he is in the evening of his career as a 37-year-old, he will now have Kumble’s Indian record of 619 Test wickets in his cross-hairs.

Despite being India’s most experienced member of the playing eleven in the Rajkot Test, Ashwin will be the first to agree that, in the last few years, he has been left out of more Test matches that he would’ve liked. Take for example the previous World Test Championship cycle (2021-2023), where he was India’s leading wicket-taker with 61 wickets (14 better than the next best, Jadeja), that haul almost single-handedly dragging the side into the WTC final last June. Yet, for the title-match at the Oval in London, he was dropped rather unceremoniously, and his absence was magnified as India crashed to their second straight WTC final defeat, this time by 209 runs to Australia.

But Ashwin is nothing if not irrepressible. Just when one assumed that his white-ball career for the country was wholly finished by 2016, Ashwin bounced back into the reckoning in both short formats well into his mid-30s. First, on the back of spirited performances in the IPL, he returned to the international fold to play 20-over cricket in time for the T20 World Cup in 2022, and then, even more inspiringly, made a comeback into the 50-over team in the nick of time for the ODI World Cup last year at home, where he got to thank his adoring home-crowd fans in Chennai by featuring in the campaign-opener against eventual champions Australia.

While it remains to be seen how many more T20Is and ODIs he will feature in hereafter, Ashwin’s future and eventual legacy will continue to be fastened to the game’s truest format, Test cricket. Apart from being an extraordinary wicket-taker, Ashwin is seldom recognised for being a genuine all-rounder, with over 3200 Test runs and five Test hundreds. These batting numbers have already encroached into the buffer-zone of Kapil Dev’s territory, who with 5200 runs and eight centuries to go with his 434 wickets (once a world record, which Ashwin has left in his wake) is rightly considered the greatest all-rounder India has ever produced.

Such lofty titles have always eluded Ashwin, but the 500^th scalp, followed by all the numbers he is yet to reel in with the red ball, should at least make him a part of the conversation. Perhaps that, being counted among the greatest, is his true destiny.

499 Test wicketshistoric milestoneIndian cricketODI World Cupoff-spinnerRavichandran AshwinTest cricket