How Ashwin remained a committed cricketer and a team man till his sudden and surprising exit

Behind Rohit, Ashwin seemed to be calming himself before his big announcement. He took a deep breath, composed himself and entered the press conference room.

Just a short while back, he had been enveloped with an emotional hug by Virat Kohli. Ashwin would remarkably try his best to shrug-off the emotions as he sat next to Rohit in front of cameras. He was also being witty. Then the penny dropped when he said “this is my last day … I had a lot of fun. I must say I’ve created a lot of memories alongside Rohit and several of my other teammates, even though I’ve lost some of them over the last few years. We are the last bunch of the OGs.” He added that he won’t be taking questions as he was too emotional now to handle that load.

Rohit would talk about how he first knew about Ashwin’s mind space when he landed in Perth on the third day of that first Test.

On the first day of that Test, just before lunch break when the Indian top order was wobbling, Ashwin had already hit the indoor nets, bowling away.

Over the next couple of days, it became a regular occurrence. On a couple of times, there was not even a support staff with him, as he kept whirring away at the nets. Thud, thud … one would hear the sounds of his spiked shoes walking down a stairway and enter the indoor nets space.

All along then, as Rohit would reveal on Wednesday, he had been contemplating retirement. Still, there was a burning desire to work on his craft.

He might be celebrated for his cerebral art but Ashwin is an emotional cricketer. He once revealed to this newspaper about how a stray remark by his father about his trait to speak his mind “screwing him in his career”, made him retreat to a room and weep.

Unable to handle the flood of emotions, he would eventually get counseling from a therapist. Of late, he said that he is in a “happy space” and trying to gather as many “moments to remember” rather than stress a lot about little stuff.

That happy space, or at least some sort of peace, would pop up now and then in Australia. On the fourth day’s play when Ravindra Jadeja, the man who replaced him in this Brisbane Test, was about to enter the tunnel through to the dressing room, Ashwin lunged across from the dugout that’s in the outside space, to pat him on the back and give him a wholesome smile. On the final morning, Ashwin and Australia’s Nathan Lyon chatted for a long while a short distance away from the pitch. Two celebrated off spinners, two men with more than thousand Test wickets between them – at 537, Ashwin has four more than Lyon – would have a nice animated discussion. Ashwin then walked across towards the warm-up area where Jasprit Bumrah patted his back.

In Adelaide, where Rohit Sharma told him he would play, he sweated a lot in the nets again. On the day before the game at the nets, he had a long chat with Gautam Gambhir and the way he then went to bat, all purpose and intensity, made it feel that he was going to play the next day.

People who know him closely say how he acquired information about Adelaide pitch of recent vintage, and watched highlights of those first-class games. On the morning of the game, he was seen pressing the pitch with his fingers, walking along the length of the pitch. Later in the day, he was seen testing the direction of the breeze, letting tufts of grass fly, an act that Jasprit Bumrah, another perfectionist, too does on nearly every match day.

In that game, Ashwin ran in almost solely front-on, loaded up just up to the shoulder. This was different from his other approach of taking it further back or higher, and use the breeze to keep drifting the ball into the left-handers and away from the right-handed batsmen.

He got the wicket of Mitch Marsh with one such delivery. A sign of a bowler who had sussed out what to do on a pitch not responsive to spin, and how to make use of the breeze instead to do his job.

Couple of days before the Brisbane Test, his last day at the outdoor nets, he bowled a bit and didn’t bat. Gambhir came across for a long chat, and Ashwin padded up to bat. Gambhir gave him throw downs, and the bowling coach, former South African fast bowler Morne Morkel fired several balls that kicked up chest and face-high at Ashwin from 17 yards. Ashwin hopped to pat them down, his last cricketing activity as an India player.

As he left the media room after his announcement to retire, Rohit was asked why this decision was taken in the middle of the series and he said some empty words about how Ashwin’s decision should be respected.

That may be so, but with two Tests still left, and particularly when the final game is in Sydney where conditions can at times even allow two spinners or at least provide the scope for the best spinner in the squad to play, this has been an odd decision.

Particularly when the best spinner in the Indian squad, not just by reputation but even in how all three of them have bowled thus far in these three Test matches, is R Ashwin. His decision and management’s inability to convince him to rethink does give an odd whiff to the entire episode.

On the final day of the Brisbane Test, sometime in the late afternoon when India were trying to avoid the follow-on, Yashasvi Jaiswal stood just outside the dugout with a ball, mimicking Ashwin’s bowling action.

Ashwin smiled, asked for the ball, and kept going through his bowling action without releasing the ball. For a long while, his eyes were fixed on the action in the middle, but the right arm that has won innumerable games for India kept ripping out imaginary off breaks.