R Ashwin has a job on his hands. He fails on the first try. It's not even close. There's even a chance he isn't as focused as he should be. His daughter forgives him and gives him a second go at opening what looks like a bottle of panneer soda (rosewater soda) she's carried down to the ground. But again it doesn't go well. Dad's not on his game. He's facing too many distractions. This is the problem with scoring a century and taking a six-for and winning a Test match for your country on home soil.
Ashwin remembers the first step he ever took into Chepauk. He vlogged about it on his YouTube channel, about attending trials at the Under-14 and Under-16 levels and waiting to see if he'd made the cut. He cherishes being part of this ground's history; he was here when Sachin Tendulkar scored that epic hundred against Pakistan and he wouldn't let his father take him home until he bought him pads just like the ones Tendulkar wore.
He remembers the bus he took to get to the ground when he was younger. "12G pudikkanum [you have to catch bus No. 12G]," he said in an episode for Star Sports Tamil in 2023. "It will go straight to Anna Salai (road). There, if some uncle is nice enough to give you a lift, you can get to the ground in like 10 minutes. If not, full-aa kit bag-a thookittu longu-longunu nadanthu varanum (you have to trudge all the way with the kit bag)."
He has memories of being coached not just by those he went and trained with but people who just happened to see him play on the street. "Everybody loves giving advice, especially when it comes to cricket. Once when I tried to hit a ball and it took an inside edge and wandered away - no run. Leg side, no runs. One uncle who was going to the hospital - there's a hospital near my place - he just came to me and said, 'Pa, how many matches have you seen? You play with a straight bat and the ball will go beautifully down the ground. Straight-aa vachu aadu. Keep the bat-face straight.'"
The century that he scored and the five-for that he took here against England in 2021 are still etched in his mind. "I've wondered if I would ever play on this ground and if people would turn out and clap for me," Ashwin said two years ago. In truth, they went way beyond that, calling his name out to the tune of "Sachiiiiin-Sachin" even when all he did was take his cap off his head, because they knew this meant he was coming on to bowl.
In that game, against England, his home crowd gave him a feeling he is very familiar with, having seen millions of masala movies, but for perhaps the first time, he was experiencing it from the other side. For those five days, he was Rajinikanth in Baashha or Shah Rukh Khan in Don or Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible. And he doesn't get that too often, if only because Test cricket in India doesn't follow a set schedule like it does abroad. Melbourne knows it'll get a Boxing Day Test. Lord's knows it'll be the biggest event of the summer. Ashwin and his beloved Chepauk don't have that luxury. At 38, even he isn't sure if he's played his last Test here.
"I don't know," he said in the press conference on Sunday. "What is a Chepauk swansong? Every time you walk out to the park, it's a swansong. You are talking about a Test match, yeah. Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? Like I said, every day, every Test match I am playing is a big thing. Not only for me, you can ask any cricketer, to go through a Test match or a Test series is a grind. And you never really know what is next when it comes to Test matches. Because you put in that effort, everything, and then you need to be lucky enough to get those performances, also work hard and simultaneously manage your ups and downs. These are all huge challenges for any Test cricketer. So I haven't thought so far ahead but if that was my swansong, what a swansong!"
Rescuing India from 144 for 6 and on the way levelling MS Dhoni's count of Test centuries. Sealing a 280-run win and on the way levelling Shane Warne's count of five-wicket hauls. Being a threat on a pitch that didn't necessarily take that much spin until the third morning. Walking away with a tenth Player-of-the-Match award. All of this was a result of painstaking preparation - Ashwin worked heavily on his batting prior to the TNPL - and a rapid assessment of the conditions he was faced with when he came on to bowl.
"The beauty about a red-soil [pitch] is, you put revs on it, there is value [even if there is no turn]. Because there is bounce. You will get hit but there is bounce. You play on some black clay surfaces around the country elsewhere, without naming them, you have to do a lot of hard work. You put a lot of revs and see nothing come out of it. And sometimes, it's better to not put revs on in certain places. So, to even understand all these things, to begin to understand and talk about it, is a fair amount of learning for me. And it's happened over the years. Like I said, this one's got solid bounce. And I love to play on a surface like this and get hit than play on another surface."
Knowing what the pitch will do is only one part of the challenge. The batter presents the other one and Ashwin has to find a way to get through them. On the second evening, he had seen evidence of the bite that was available to him if he dropped his pace right down. Mominul Haque went for a sweep and both he and the wicketkeeper Rishabh Pant were beaten comfortably by extravagant bounce. That ball only clocked 80.4 kph.
R Ashwin on if he can label this performance his "Chepauk Swansong" and being envious of Jadeja
The bowler in him understood that he needed to be slow through the air to get purchase. The batter in him then augmented that piece of information. "Tamim [Iqbal] is standing next to you," Ashwin told the host broadcaster. "He'll tell you that if you keep going slower on these surfaces, you can go on the back foot a lot more."
Ashwin combined this knowledge to set his traps. At first, he would feed Bangladesh the quicker, flatter deliveries to keep them pinned on the crease. Then he'd toss one up and if everything went to plan, the batter, having been set up to expect a certain pace and a certain length, would be undone.
"I was earning my right to bowl slower every now and then. Because on certain pitches where you get help out of surface, you can afford to toss the ball a little more, but this is a surface where need to change up your pace, change up your length, and then pull the one that's slower. So very often the one that was reacting off the surface was really slow."
Three of his six wickets came off deliveries in the early 80s.
Two others spoke of how good he is at picking apart a batter's defence. He bowled around the wicket for virtually the entire Test match because there were a lot of left-hand batters and he was playing on their inside edge. He would bring them forward with his length and leave them stranded with his overspin, because the ball was primed to dip on them and then kick up off the pitch.
Shakib was caught at short leg as this sequence played out.
The best of the lot was Mominul, bowled on the outside edge. Ashwin was somehow able to get enough turn to beat the bat but not so much that he would miss the stumps. Going a little wider of the crease helped create the angle into the batter and make him play down the wrong line and then he did something with the seam to limit the help he would get off the track.
Normally an offbreak bowler would have the seam pointing to first slip. This one was pointing a lot squarer. It also turned scrambled as the ball began its descent into the pitch. An upright seam is usually the driving force behind the turn and bounce that a fingerspinner gets. Here Ashwin put limits on both specifically to so that what happened had a chance to happen - beating the batter but not the stumps. It doesn't always work this way. Sometimes the turn might not be enough, and the angle takes the ball straight into the middle of the bat. But this was Chepauk and Ashwin knows it has always got his back. "Some energy just pulls me into this ground."