You could always tell he was an engineer. Anil Kumble looked tall, wiry and scholarly when he made his debut in 1990. He ambled along self-consciously, often looking down at the ground before looking up to wipe that sweat off his forehead: exactly the kind of walk you would associate with an engineering student with books in one hand and a mini-drafter in the other.
He even wore proper nerdy glasses, not the sleek ones you might expect from a serious sportsman. You could tell he may not be the smoothest operator when it came to asking a girl out. Yes, this was a bona fide engineer from India.
Bringing the science into leg spin
His methods were not revolutionary, but they weren’t traditional either. It almost seemed as though he was out there running an experiment for a new research paper he plans to write soon. Yes, there was Bhagwat Chandrasekhar who had bowled fast leg-spinners before, but that was due to a birth disability. Kumble was more deliberate and way more accurate than Chandra, bringing a sense of the scientific into the art of leg spin.
Australia’s Shane Warne was proper Hollywood. Sri Lanka’s Muttiah Muralitharan was a proper one-of-a-kind. Kumble was a proper workman. He didn’t get those 619 Test wickets, he earned them. While Warne and Murali were thinking of ways to get the ball to turn more, Kumble was trying to figure out how much turn would be enough.
Experts like to repeat that cricket is a game of angles. This engineer from Bangalore knew it better than most. He knew his probabilities too: bowl the same delivery on a good spot over and over, and the probability of a batsman making a mistake rises.
Kumble understood rotational dynamics. He understood the value of over-spin on slower Indian pitches and eventually figured out the value of being slower and imparting more side-spin on overseas surfaces. He also knew how to prey upon the psyche of a batsman who has just come in, invariably trying them out with his trademark fast straight top-spinner looking for a leg-before.
Every captain’s dream
Much has been spoken about Kumble’s 10 wickets against Pakistan in Delhi in 1999 and his bowling with a broken jaw during the West Indies tour in 2002. But the striking thing about both those feats is that they weren't completely unexpected. You always knew Kumble could run through a batting line up on a turning Day 5 pitch. You knew he would come out to bowl even if a bear came on the pitch and chewed away his left hand.
On Indian pitches, we didn’t just expect Kumble to perform, we counted on him. At a Titan Cup game in 1996, Australia were chasing 289 and needed 62 off their last 10 overs. A spinner bowling at the death wasn’t routine in those days and the dew at Mohali made things even harder. When Australia were seven down and Kumble had two overs left in his kitty, skipper Sachin Tendulkar decided to bowl him out, obviously expecting wickets. Kumble shattered the stumps twice in those two overs, allowing Tendulkar to roll his arm over in the final over to have Brad Hogg run out, giving India a famous win.
Details of the match are blurry in my head and and there aren’t even YouTube clips available, but I distinctly remember those two overs of Kumble when he concentrated as hard while on wiping the ball with a towel as he did while zeroing in on the exact spot where he wanted it to land. Over the years, Kumble going for the kill became a sight to behold. This was when the gentle geek turned into a hungry tiger that had just spotted his prey.
Leader of the pack
Kumble was made vice-captain of the team in 1996: the same year when Sourav Ganguly, Rahul Dravid and VVS Laxman made their debuts. He went on to play under two of them as captain and had another one on the interview panel that selected him as a coach. In his own words, he got the captaincy by default when no one wanted it. In a country where bowlers seldom get the same reverence as batsmen, this was always going to be the case. He led the team with distinction both on and off the field in that Australia tour of 2008. The win at Perth after the infamous Sydney Test that year was a high point of his captaincy and India’s Test history.
When Kumble finally handed over the reins of the team to Mahendra Singh Dhoni, one wondered how he would have performed as captain if had he got an extended run. It’s only fair then, that he is finally getting his due now as the team's head coach. A keen reader of the game like him, who thrived on diligence in his methods, is the perfect foil to an eager and aggressive Kohli. The combination could be very, very potent.
