Spinner with killer touch

The Electronic Telegraph Friday 1 September 1995 Cricket

Kumble spinner with killer touch

Simon Hughes on the Houdini act working its magic for Northants

LEG spinners are usually short, stocky and insolent. Mushtaq Ahmed makes a surprising amount of noise for his size, Shane Warne looks and struts like a well-fed beach-bum, Abdul Qadir is small and barbed with a howling appeal like a wrestler who has stepped on a pin.

At first appearances, Anil Kumble - pronounced Koom-blay - does not fit the mould. He has a tall, lithe physique and, when wearing his metal-rimmed spectacles, looks like a computer sales- men. He is softly spoken, courteous and modest. But put him in whites, give him contact lenses and a ball and offer him some English batsmen, and he becomes an ogre, fizzing down leggies, top-spinners and quick in- dippers, following them up with a yell of anguish when a bat-pad catch falls just out of reach.

Keith Fletcher obviously only spotted one side to his charac- ter when, after watching him bowl in Johannesburg, he made the now famous comment: "I didn`t see him turn a single ball from leg to off. I don`t believe we`ll have much problem with him."

The first part of his observation was on the spot -even now he rolls the ball out of his hand rather than really tweaking it - but the second was a double wide. He subsequently bothered and bewil- dered all England`s batsmen in 1993 in India and, claiming his wicket four times out of six, wrecked Robin Smith`s confi- dence so badly it took him a year to recover.

It is a year ago this week that Northamptonshire, rejected by Warne, finally tracked down Kumble at a training camp in Madras and offered him terms over the phone. He accepted immediate- ly. Mike Procter and Mohammed Azharuddin had recommended him to Allan Lamb, and what excellent judges they have proved to be. He has not missed a championship match, averaged six wickets a game, and master- minded several Houdini acts in the course of taking 48 in the last five.

This is the kind of havoc another unorthodox leg spinner, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar, Kumble`s mentor, used to wreak. They are both from Bangalore and first met when the teenage Kumble was a medium pace in-swing bowler.

"Looks to me like he bowls a lot of flippers"

He always had the ability to roll out a leg-cutter and over a period of several years gradually increased the fingerwork and re- duced the pace. "Whenever I`m home I discuss strategy, line, different grips with Chandra," Kumble said, examining a set of digits surpris- ingly free of spinners` callouses.

"Not very surprising that," Richie Benaud said, "he`s not a big turner of the ball. Looks to me like he bowls a lot of flippers." Kumble denies this, claiming he has not yet got the confidence to bowl them in a match, but he certainly pins a lot of batsmen lbw with a wicked, skidding delivery.

The essence of his bowling is a subtle change of pace allied to relentless accuracy. His slower ball spins more, the quicker one is so fast that Kevin Curran, his regular slip fielder, often re- quests a secret warning so he can stand two yards further back. For- tunately, the slip is less important to Kumble than the silly point, which is constantly in the game as batsmen lunge forward, bat behind pad. "People can`t seem to judge his pace at all," Curran said, "and he`s amazingly aggressive for a spinner."

His record speaks for itself. He ribs Lamb constantly for be- ing his first Test victim - snared at silly point in the 1990 series -and is now one short of a hundred Test victims in only 20 appearances at a strike rate practically identical to Warne`s.

Kumble is still only 24, but he and Mushtaq, with 170-odd first-class wickets between them this season, have discovered that Robin Smith is not the only English batsman who struggles against leg spin.

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