No matter how less the T20s and ODIs are offering for off-spin, Test cricket remains the same for the off-spinners. In white-ball cricket, when the batters take the initiative to attack the bowlers, it will always pressure the bowlers and ultimately lead to the leaking of runs, particularly the right-hand batters (RHBs).
But in cricket played in white flannels, the pressure is created by the bowling side as they bowl for wickets. The batters, who won’t be at the urge to score runs, will wait for the loose balls. Eventually, this leads the batters to depend more on their defence technique. These criteria give the off-spinners a great role by bringing the ball towards the RHB. It is considered a free wicket against LHB for off-spinners, especially on turning tracks.
Off spin has been an emotion for most cricket folklore, especially in the sub-continent. We must have imitated the greats like Muttiah Muralitharan, Harbhajan Singh, and Saqlain Mushtaq.
There were times when the right-handed batters found it difficult to face the ball that cut in towards them. Batting wasn’t ‘step and hit’ by that time, given the conditions. A batter with proper stepping down technique and sweep shot could play the off-spinners effectively. Since DRS wasn’t available, anything on the pads created jitters for the batters – made them hesitate to go for sweeps often.
Related: The Top Ten Sweep Shot Players in Cricket
As cricket evolved, T20s and its franchise-based cricket branch made the game more competitive. Every single move on the ground is being monitored and captured for analysis. As a result, improvement is needed daily; it is the only key to survival for any cricketer.
Off-spinners of present need to bowl in unusual ways to be successful as the normal angle in which the ball gets into the right-handers easily gets into the arc of the modern-day right-handed-batters. Sweeping has become so common, and the stepping-down has become the easiest way to get the game going for a batter.
With the DRS, it is very rare for an off-spinner to get the ball into the pads of the RHB effectively – either the impact or the hitting is outside in most cases. It comes down to cutting the sharp turn to get LBW, but it becomes easy for the batters to slog.
Moreover, since the RHBs are comparatively higher in numbers than LHBs, it becomes more challenging to be an off-spinner. LHBs, the only advantage for the off-spinners, are normalized by the distractions of the right-hand-left hand combination in batting.
Let’s look at how the current-crop-greats like Ravichandran Ashwin and Nathan Lyon deal with this evolution.
Even though they both are exponents in red-ball cricket, they couldn’t be as successful in the white ball as in the red ball.
