A Terrific Interview With Ashwin
Sid Monga has a terrific interview with Ravichandran Ashwin in The Cricket Monthly. It is worth reading in full and at leisure. It has rightly been received kindly on Cricket Twitter.
I write this quick note on my phone, on the bus, just to record what struck me about the interview and the reaction to it. First, Monga’s questions are resolutely about cricket - about injuries and their consequences to bowling and the player’s position in an extremely competitive environment (as one would expect a top Test team to be - brutal, unsentimental, constantly demanding), and about tactics and methods and their consequences. There are reflections on what people say, but those are never centre stage or accusatory. They are human reactions.
Some of the reaction casts Ashwin as a uniquely cerebral player. This, I think, is to misread the evidence. What sets Ashwin apart is not his ideas, but the fact that he can actually do what he wants - his mastery of the physical art of bowling. Every Test player - including Ashwin’s opponents - is constantly thinking about their game, and constantly changing and developing bits and pieces of it, reconstructing others, discarding old methods and bringing in new ones. Some do it better than others. A few do it well enough to be all time greats.
Ashwin is sui generis as a cricketer - in the class of the small handful of original geniuses who appear in the game in any generation. This interview however, gets to the typical parts - the details - of being a Test cricketer.
That is its real achievement. The interviewer is not neutral, but appears as a curious observer. The world of the Test cricketer (and the elite sportsperson generally) is a different world, inaccessible to amateur players. It is part of the journalist’s art to bridge that.
Sid Monga’s interview achieves this. The reaction to Sid Monga’s interview shows how infrequently this is done. He has achieved in one interview what many biographers fail to achieve in entire biographies. Hopefully, we will get to read many more such interviews of all these great athletes and competitors. Not interviews which cast them as a corporate project or an academic thesis, but as exemplars of what elite sport really is, on its own terms.