Jaddu

The under-appreciated Ravi Jadeja

After a handy cameo with the bat, Ravindra Jadeja just bowled Chennai Super Kings into the final of the Indian Premier League. There have been rumours this week of a rift between Jadeja and his captain Mahendra Singh Dhoni. They both deny there is anything going on and there seemed no sign of it today. It felt like a good time to repost this for those who may have joined us after it was first published. It’s the case for Jadeja as a great all-rounder.

Sanjay Manjrekar once called Ravindra Jadeja a “bits and pieces” player, a slight that is strangely common. It was a strange judgement. Jadeja has 264 Test wickets at 24.22 and 2658 runs at 35.91. Only Sir Ian Botham did the double of 2,500 Test runs and 250 wickets quicker. There has been no significant left-arm spin bowler who takes his wickets more quickly or more cheaply. Jadeja was faster to 200 Test wickets than Bishen Bedi but most cricket pundits would place Bish above Sri Pandit Sir Lord Ravindra Jadeja. Why should this be, especially when you add the fact that Jadeja might be India’s finest ever fielder and ranks with Bradman, Lara, Hammond, Ponsford and WG Grace as a scorer of three triple centuries in first class cricket. He has a Test batting average over 35 which means the surplus of his batting over his bowling average yields only to Sobers, Miller, Kallis and Imran Khan. The next in the list of the great all-rounders, on the usual measure, is Ravindra Jadeja of the Jannigar district in Gujurat.  Why is he not feted as such? What is it about Jadeja that goes under the radar? Perhaps, as Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “to be great is to be misunderstood”.

Jadeja is a flashy character but a prosaic cricketer. He has the comportment of Shane Warne, the mentor who called him a “rockstar” but a miserly and repetitive delivery style and bowling strategy. As a batsman he began his Test career like a hyperactive child but since going up the order in 2018 has batted calmly, responsibly, unobtrusively. The sense that Jadeja is unmemorable calls the mind the example of Jacques Kallis who is a legend in the record books but who attracted the criticism that his contributions did not sufficiently benefit the team. More than 4,000 of Kallis’s runs came in drawn games, at an average of 74. That begins to look like a personal pursuit. But this is emphatically not true of Jadeja. In Indian victories, Jadeja has 192 wickets at 20.11 and that includes 10 occasions on which he has taken 5 wickets or more. As a batsman, Jadeja has contributed 1737 runs to Indian victories at an average over 40. Only Ben Stokes among contemporary all-rounders has made a comparable contribution to his nation’s victories. Stokes is rightly regarded as a talent for the ages. Why not Jadeja?

Home advantage is a flaw in Jadeja’s claim to greatness. Jadeja is a much better player in India than he is outside his homeland. He averages 39 with the bat at home and only 32 away. He takes his plentiful wickets at 20 in India but his rarer successes away come at more than 34 each. Still, he is not a bad player outside India, just a solid one. At home he is, by a distance, the most successful all-rounder India has ever produced. He ought to command the respect and devotion rightly accorded to Kapil Dev but in India too Jadeja has had to fight for recognition.

It is not just that, in the first half of his career so far, Jadeja’s place in the Test side, or even the squad, was never secure. It is that Jadeja attracted scrutiny and criticism that was withheld from others. Jadeja received regular social media trolling in the wake of Indian defeats, sometimes castigated as an unwarranted favourite of MS Dhoni and sometimes the butt of sarcastic references. An online joke, begun in 2013 by Dhoni and Ashwin, in which Jadeja is mocked as Sir Ravindra went viral and his Wikipedia page has been vandalized to include derogatory remarks. Jadeja maintains he has no problem with any of this but it is hard to imagine Ashwin or Jasprit Bumrah being on the receiving end in the same way.

There is something about Jadeja that is just harder to take seriously. The elaborate facial topiary didn’t help. Neither did the ill-advised caste-based sword celebration with his bat whenever he gets to fifty. Jadeja seems to play the naughty boy companion to his more studious classmate Ashwin. Where Ashwin looks like the boy his mother could be proud of – a student of medicine or accountancy – Jadeja looks as if he wants the attention more than the achievement. He can even be drawn into political controversy. Jadeja’s wife Rivaba is a BNP politician and Jadeja himself has been outspoken in his support for Narendra Modi’s government.

Yet the paradox is that there has been so much achievement and that his play in fact belies his appearance. Sanjay Manjrekar made another telling remark when he said that Jadeja’s skill as a bowler lies in doing the simple things right. This might be a manifesto for first-class sport which is the endless repetition, at a high level of competence, of basic skills that often elude the rest of us. Jadeja as a player has no flamboyance or adornment at all. He just seems to put it there, in the right place all the time. He does the right thing again, the batsman loses the battle with patience and, 250 Test wickets later, there you have it. Jadeja has gone relatively unexamined as a bowler and, unlike his fluent and loquacious partner Ashwin who talks to the world about spin bowling on his youtube channel, Jadeja keeps his counsel. He may look like a cavalier, but he doesn’t play like one and he doesn’t speak like one either. But quietly, without fanfare, Ravindra Jadeja is building a body of work that makes him one of the greatest of Indian cricketers. Quite some bits and pieces.