The Quality Has Dropped Drastically - Murali Kartik Says The Skill Set Of Spinners In India Has Gone Downhill

Former India spinner Murali Kartik makes a shocking statement by saying that the quality and the skill-set of spinners in India has ‘only been going downhill’.

This comment by the former spinner comes as a surprise despite India being a powerhouse of spinners and an almost indomitable force as home, where spinners have wreaked havoc on turning tracks – India hasn’t lost a Test series at home since 2013.

From the likes of Erapalli Prasanna, BS Chandrasekhar, Bishan Singh Bedi to Anil Kumble, Harbhajan Singh, and now the baton slowly passing from Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja to Axar Patel and Washington Sundar – add to it the impressive show of leg-spinners Kuldeep Yadav, Yuzvendra Chahal, and Rahul Chahar in white-ball cricket – the Asian giants have almost always had a surplus of tweakers in stock.

If you look at skills over the years, it’s only been going downhill: Murali Kartik

In spite of that, Murali Kartik reckons that the ‘quality or skill-wise’ spinners are on a decline in the country. He underlines that the spinners earlier had the characteristic of turning the ball – hence the name. However, he observed the spinners these days, influenced by the advent of white-ball cricket as well, aren’t the ideal ones as they don’t turn the ball as the former spinners used to.

Murali Kartik, who represented India in 8 Tests, 37 ODIs, and 1 T20I, asserted that the spinners of the previous century would term the current ones as ‘horrible’ for lacking the threat to take wickets with spin-bowling.

“There are a few issues regarding this. See the quality or skill-wise, you see spin in a certain way. A spinner, as I was told when I first learned spin from Bishan Bedi, was a man that spins the ball. That’s the first thing. The art of spin bowling is about pricing out wickets. For that, if you look at skills over the years, it’s only been going downhill,” the former left-arm spinner said on The Last Wicket podcast.

“Things have changed and with that, the quality has dropped drastically. So if you ask me do we have the kind of spinners which we had, no. As I said, it’s only been going down. And I’ve always said that many former spinners, who used to look at us when we were playing, would have been turning in their graveyards – what are these bowlers? Horrible bowlers,” he added.

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