Spin at the Nagpur Test — Border Gavaskar Trophy 2023
A look at the wicket, how they used it and how the batters handled it
This tweet from Bharat Sundaresan was one of the first that I saw before the start of the Nagpur Test talking about wicket preparation to aid the Indian spinners.
Since then, there’s been several discussions during and after the match on the pitch and how it behaved. It was intriguing to see this and there can be a lot of debates on the ethics of this. However, it is hard to downplay the argument that both teams got to use the same surface. So, I decided to look at how each team did use it. In addition, here, I take a look at the spinners from the both sides, what they did & how the batters handled them.
Pitch Use
Let’s first take a look at how much of that “doctored” part of the wicket was used by each team.
Against LHB, both teams landed deliveries at the same spot. This was dominated by the off-spinners i.e. mostly Ashwin from India. Against RHB, interestingly, Australia stuck to bowling at the stumps. They did quite a bit of this from around the wicket. Murphy and Lyon bowled 72% and 65% of their deliveries respectively from around the wicket, while Ashwin bowled only 47% of his from there.
Purchase that a spinner can get from the wicket depends on several factors related to the actual execution of the delivery and the resulting physics of how the ball hits the wicket. However, looking at grip and bounce as two aspects of the purchase derived from the wicket by executing their skills, here is how the wicket fared across spinners. Note that some areas of the wicket are more suitable for bowling arm balls, carrom balls and other variations that are not necessarily designed to exploit grip and purchase and that could be playing into these graphs.
With red being more purchase and blue being less, it looks like the unwatered areas impacted the grip that bowlers got out of the wicket more than the bounce. I also don’t see many significant differences on either end.
For India, it was Ashwin and Axar Patel who bowled outside the offstump. Jadeja stuck to straighter lines.
Ashwin bowled fuller outside the off stump or length while bowling on the stumps. Other than this, the two teams had a shot at the same areas of the pitch.
Overall, the Indians did not get more purchase from the wicket than the Aussies did when one accounts for bowling styles and location (e.g. Ashwin and Axar bowled outside the right-handers off stump the most.)
The SLAs
Going into the Test, India’s bowling attack was clearly more varied with the two SLAs in addition to the offie, but Ashwin is no vanilla offie and the two SLAs are by no means identical. Himanish Ganjoo wrote about how extraordinary Axar is as a bowler and I’ve written about him before as well. Let’s look at the difference between Axar and Jadeja in this Test starting with how batters fared against them when they chose to attack and defend.
Now, Axar bowled much less than Jadeja did, so we should take these numbers with a pinch of salt. However, they show that Axar was attacked slightly more but batters were also in less control against him when they attacked. Jadeja on the other hand caused more problems when batters were defending against him. If we look at the shots played, we see that Axar was also driven more off the front foot. When batters went back to him they were defending. Axar got attacked on faster deliveries where he ended up pitching it too full and wide as we will soon see.
Moreover, batters hardly went back to Jadeja. This is largely because of his slower pace in addition to the lengths that he bowls. In the below graph, red indicated a delivery that was played deeper in the crease.
I built some simple models to use tracking data to help distinguish between Jadeja’s deliveries that were attacked from those that were defended. I used these models to generate insights. I’ve taken a similar approach for several other insights that follow.
Jadeja unsurprisingly got attacked when he bowled too full.
But interestingly, removing those full deliveries, he got attacked when he bowled faster with more overspin. Axar on the other hand hardly got attacked when he bowled overspin which he usually does less of. Maybe this is a sign of the Aussies being better prepared for his lifting (as opposed to dipping pre-bounce) undercutters.
Most of Axar’s balls where he was attacked were also bowled wider.
Axar and Jadeja’s similar ranges of overspin suggests that Axar didn’t bowl too many of his extreme undercutters with lift. His deliveries with most lift and nominal to low drift had the highest proportion of attacked deliveries.
The Off-spinners
Let’s look at the Aussie spinners first to understand how much variety they brought in with their attack. What differentiates Lyon and Murphy?
The difference in their heights results in different release heights. However, in terms of differentiating in delivery characteristics not directly related to their physical differences, speed and overspin where the key factors.
Lyon bowled through a range of overspin and speed but Murphy bowled on the ends of the spectrum. Most of his deliveries were faster with less overspin and he bowled slow overspinning deliveries as a variation.
In terms of outcomes, they were dealt with quite similarly by the Indians. They were a bit more comfortable attacking Lyon, but more importantly, Murphy caused very few problems when they defended against him. You really want your bowlers to make batters uncomfortable in defense. Attacking is a choice and has risk associated with it that the batter chose to take on, but you need to be able to make batters uncomfortable in survival mode. If there is no risk of getting out defending, then you rely more and more on the batter to get themselves out.
So how does Ashwin differ from these off spinners? First, he bowled much slower, especially against the right-handers.
Against left-handers he was a lot more one-paced, but still slower. The slower pace meant that for the same imparted drift force and overspin, he was able to realize more actual drift and dip.
Ashwin used the crease a bit differently as well. He bowled from closer to the stumps when he was bowling over the wicket and from further out when he was bowling around the wicket to RHB.
Against LHB, they all usually bowled around the wicket. When the Aussies bowled from a wider release point, they tended to also bowl faster.
All of them bowled arm balls when they went wider — less drift, low drift or even lift, but Ashwin not changing his pace disguised this quite well or maybe I am only naively calling these arm balls from him.
Next, let’s briefly talk about Ashwin in each innings since he operated a bit differently in each with different results. He got Carey, Cummins and Boland; the lower order in the first innings, but snapped up Khawaja, Warner, Handscomb, Renshaw and Carey (again) in the second.
Ashwin bowled a lot more with an older ball in the first innings and yet he bowled faster. In the second innings, he slowed it down even as he got less drift and overspin from the new ball.
Why did we only look at RHB here? Ashwin hardly bowled against LHB in the first innings (only 17 of 95 deliveries to LHB in the first inn and 49 of 72 in the second inn).
So how did the batters handle all of this?
The Indian batters batted quite similarly against Lyon and Murphy despite subtle differences in how they operated. The differences that Ashwin brought in resulted in the Aussies handling him differently in each innings. As we saw he also bowled against a different set of batters in each innings.
Ashwin bowling to the top order, pulled them out on the front foot a lot more to defend and drive in the second inn and let them work him around less. In the first inn, the lower order also came down the track to Ashwin more to counter the spin.
Generally, the Indian batters went on the backfoot as a scoring option a lot more using the depth of the crease while the Aussies went on the backfoot to defend. The Aussies swept a lot more than the Indians using it as a form of attack.
Recall the comments on the value of causing discomfort when being defended against earlier. Adding Ashwin’s overall numbers to this, the difference in the impact that he & Lyon had on the batters becomes quite obvious.
Summarizing some of the key areas that we have touched upon here:
- The unwatered areas of the wicket did provide more purchase for spinners, but it was available and exploited by both teams. The difference was in how the aid was utilized and how the batters handled it.
- The Indian attack was more varied and we talk of batters expressing themselves usually, but these guys expressed themselves fully. The Aussie spinners were bogged down and bowled less attacking speeds and variations, allowing the Indians to work them around while posing fewer unforced risks.
- Axar suffered a similar fate to the Aussie bowlers wherein he got attacked on his go to deliveries when he erred slightly. This made him bowl more defensively and reduced the chances of success for him.
- The Aussie batters could take a leaf out of the Indian batters — mostly Rohit and Jadeja, and use the depth of the crease better. They relied on the sweep as an attacking option. They could instead look to go down the wicket more and go back more decisively
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