Man with S-pin code 

Sunil Subramaniam mentored R Ashwin in his early days, convincing  an inquisitive young batsman to focus on  off-spin. Ashwin had also turned to him during hard times.  The coach tells The Sunday Stan

CHENNAI: Sunil Subramaniam ranks among those unfortunate spinners, who despite taking 285 first-class wickets in a career spanning over 12 years, was never able to go beyond domestic cricket. With Anil Kumble, Venkatapathy Raju, Ashish Kapoor and Rajesh Chauhan in the mix, Subramaniam could never make it past the South Zone side, just like Kanwaljit Singh. Maybe 


those scars still exist today, but it was so hard during those times that after quitting the game in 2001, he didn’t even touch the ball till 2005 or bother reading about the game.


Then in 2005, an unlikely offer came his way. During his playing days, Subramaniam was usually the last name that came up for discussion when one talked about coaching. In the days where the role of a coach was merely to oversee training sessions, Subramaniam was seen as a rebel, one who kept asking questions as a player, much to the amusement of the coach. “I always used to ask questions as a player. But those days nobody really told you how to go about it,” says Subramaniam.

Sunil Subramaniam,R Ashwin 
Sunil Subramaniam,R Ashwin 


So when RI Palani, the current joint-secretary of Tamil Nadu Cricket Association, approached Subramaniam with an offer to coach at the body’s academy, he thought twice about it. If he took up the position, it would mean he was returning to the game he had dumped four years back. But the job profile of finding a future spinner for the state tempted him to take up the role. 


It was during one of those days that Subramaniam ran into a certain Ravichandran Ashwin. “I’d just taken over as coach and during the first few days, this guy kept asking questions. I was like, ‘who is this young boy asking so many things? Does he know what he is asking.’ I had not seen this boy bat or bowl but he kept asking questions. It came to a point where I had to tell him, ‘Dai..Chumma iruda, koncham neram’ (Keep quiet for a while).


“But that is what made him catch the eye. Because at 16 or 17, players normally don’t ask questions, they just say ‘yes’ or ‘no’ but Ashwin was different even then,” Subramaniam revealed.


The relationship between Ashwin and Subramaniam began in 2005, and continues till date. Subramaniam didn’t take long to spot his talent and predicted Ashwin, who almost bowled with an identical action—a mirror image of Subramaniam, who bowled left-handed—could be a high-level spinner as he had height and bounce.

But to convince an aspiring batsman to become an off-spinner was no easy job. “When he came to me, he was already bowling off-spin. Lot of people believe, I was the one who converted him from a medium-pacer to an off-spinner. But that is wrong. For me, it was all about convincing him to persist with off-spin. He liked batting and he reminded me of VVS Laxman. He was always serious about it. So when he is scoring all these runs now, it hardly surprises me or anyone who has seen him grow as a cricketer.


“I told him, ‘it’s easy to get into the team if you are a batsman and you are scoring. But at the same time, it’s also easy to get dropped. In case of a bowler, it is tough to get in. But once you do and if you continue getting wickets, you stay on top. It is a tough road but it is what makes you a good cricketer.’ Ashwin understood these things,” Subramaniam says.


For a player who was running his own team much before he took up first-class cricket, Ashwin recently said how he is “100 per cent method, 80 per cent skill and 150 per cent madness,” and nobody other than himself could have summed it up like that. While in Chennai, he still doesn’t miss out on playing tennis ball or underarm cricket outside his residence in West Mamballam, where he even created his own small ground to help his friends train.

“He has always been a leader. He is the ‘Dada’ (don) of his group! He is a big time prankster, who has made lot of his friends look like fools with his tricks. But, whenever they need him, he has always been there and hasn’t changed a single bit as a person. He likes asking questions, because he is well-read and doesn’t have any self-doubts. He always believed he could achieve it at the highest level, and he worked hard for it.

As a coach, you don’t need to spoon-feed him, because he likes to learn by himself. As a cricketer, he is very analytical and likes to set his own fields depending on what he is going to bowl and where batsmen will hit. Just imagine that this is how he thought when he started out! That is what sets him apart,” Subramaniam says. 


After some early success in the international arena, Ashwin too went through a lean patch, when he was benched from the Test side owing to poor form and inability to take wickets on foreign soil. “He was doing a lot then.

The load-up or delivery stride has to be correct for him to be successful. But because there was an imbalance in his load-up, there was a bigger delivery stride. And because of these things, he was losing his natural trajectory. So it was all about correcting one of them first and the rest just fell into place. When you are playing at the top level and something goes wrong, there is no time to change. You end up trying things in the middle and that is where the problem started,” Subramaniam adds.

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