What it means to be taking 10 wickets in an innings

There are rare occasions when you would term cricket as anything but a batsman’s game. Getting ten wickets in an innings is one of those moments. As Gavaskar and other commentators put it during the game, cricket is being played since the 1850s, and yet there have been only three players in the history of the game to achieve this incredible feat. If you have been lucky enough, you would have been alive to witness all three occasions. For my part, I have seen Kumble get a 10-fer with a bandaged head, and now Ajaz Patel. So what does it mean to get a 10-fer in a batsman’s game? Imagine getting to a 300 or a 350 single-handedly on difficult conditions. Imagine getting a man-of-the-match as a bowler despite there being a hundred scored by a batsman. A lot depends on the nature and surface of the pitch as well. The conditions have to favourable. Even then, it’s no mean feat. Take the other spinners for instance, Will Sommerville and Rachin Ravindra seemed to be bowling on a green surface with no assistance for spin. And to top it all, players from the subcontinent (with due respect to players elsewhere) always seem to handle spin marginally better than others. Ajaz Patel sprinted past all these hurdles with perseverance, and perhaps a lot of belief in his own abilities. The magnitude of the feat is such that it boosts the confidence of a player in unimaginable ways. We might perhaps see Patel trying out different variations the way Ashwin has done over the years. We might even perhaps see Ajaz Patel turn into the sort of player who becomes difficult to negotiate with even when there is little assistance for spin. All in all, from any angle you look at it, this achievement is big, and will hopefully be transformative in the young man’s career.