The trend of leaving grass on most of the pitches during the Ranji Trophy season has discouraged teams from fielding spinners.
At a time when the art of spin bowling is on the decline, Rajinder Goel, one of the finest tweakers to have never played for India, feels that it is the lack of skills is causing the problem.
Pointing at the green-top track at the Bansi Lal Stadium here, Goel, a left-arm spinner who had 750 First Class wickets in a career spanning 27 years, wonders how grass on a pitch can stop a good spinner from taking wickets.
According to Goel, the problem lies elsewhere.
“The decline is due to too much one-day and Twenty20 cricket. Spinners are afraid of flighting the ball, and are not accurate. Nowadays bats are so good that even a mis-hit can get you a six. That’s why spinners are bowling faster, pitching wide and producing negative deliveries. It is like delivering from a bowling machine. If you do not have variations and do not use the crease then you cannot get wickets,” he says.
Goel says the best way to get wickets was to make the batsman play.
“In our times, we were being asked not to waste deliveries and make the batsman play all the time. Now spinners think it is better if a batsman misses a ball. The idea is to stop him from scoring,” he says.
The 72-year-old, who played in an era when the famous spin quartet was at its peak, backs his argument with examples.
“Grass on wickets cannot be an excuse. Shane Warne, Anil Kumble, Harbhajan Singh and (Muttiah) Muralitharan — even though there were some doubts about the latter’s action — have picked up wickets all over the world. Have not our spinners such as Prasanna, Venkatraghavan, Bishan Singh Bedi, Chandrasekhar, taken wickets on grassy surfaces abroad?” he asks.
“A good spinner can take wickets on any surface. Similarly, a fast bowler cannot give the excuse that he is bowling on a flat track.
“In a match in Delhi in the early 1980s, Madan Lal picked up nine wickets on a green pitch, and I got eight wickets, against a Delhi side which was packed with Test cricketers.”
Goel expressed satisfaction at the ICC’s initiatives against suspect actions.
“A bowler's action should be clean. It’s good that the ICC has cracked down on the offenders,” he said.
