Since the very dawn of cricket in India, pace bowling has very seldom been associated with Indian cricket. It has always been the spinners and batsmen who made important contributions in most of Indian team’s success, especially in the dry and dusty sub-continent pitches. The famous Indian Spin quartet of Erapalli Prasanna and Srinivas Venkataraghavan (both off spinners), Bhagwat Chandrasekhar (a leg spinner), and Bishen Singh Bedi (a left-arm spinner) therefore became one of the most deadly combinations in world cricket. . Between them, they played 231 Test matches, taking 853 wickets. However only on rare occasions did these all bowlers together featured in the playing 11. Usually one of the off spinners was dropped and three played in the match depending upon the opponent and conditions.

Then came the famous spin duo of Harbhajan Singh and Anil Kumble and created a similar magic in world cricket, if not the same. And years later once again in this young and aggressive Test team led by Kohli, we find another duo – R Ashwin-Ravindra Jadeja doing good now.

To see Ashwin evolve as a bowler has been one of those amazing transitions that you just don’t want to miss. And the best part being he is still young and hopefully lots of cricket left in him, which is only good news for the team because Ashwin can only get better from here. And dare call him only a bowler, the man has got four test match hundreds alongside his name. This also means that along with Jadeja the team’s lower middle order gets strengthened a lot something which India has been looking to do over the years.

In fact the competition of getting a place in the national team between and among the spinners is so tough that some of the outstanding Indian spinners haven’t got as many games under their belt as they should have. Guys like Amit Mishra, Piyush Chawla, Murali Kartik, etc were by no means ordinary spinners. Looking at Ramesh Powar’s domestic records would tell you that the man deserved a lot more than just two Test matches.

However, these people were simply not the obvious choice in the team because of better spinners in the squad already. It is essential to have such strong and healthy competition in the team members and only then can we produce world class cricketers.

There has never been perhaps the same intense competition for fast bowling in India. It is only now that we see symptoms of something of that sort. Perhaps, Zaheer, Nehra and Srinath were the best new ball attack India have managed. With such competition beginning to flourish, we are in for a beautiful phase of Indian cricket. And once we go overseas to play against the best in the world, would be perhaps Test in the actual sense of the word.

Keeping all these in mind for the India-England Test Series, let’s look forward to the competiton that lies ahead.