Where have the spinners gone? Every cricket lover asks the question, despite Harbhajan Singh's phenomenal success against the Australians and his continued good showing thereafter. The worry is justified as the Punjab spinner is the exception rather than the rule in a general poverty of spin. When Anil Kumble comes back, they may strike in tandem, but in the meantime the selectors have gone back to Rahul Sanghvi, and he seems to be the best of the current lot of left arm spinners. At the under-19 level, there are promising young spinners, but the chasm separating the slow men of the past and the present is widening all the time, it seems.

Why? Almost all the past masters of the craft agree that today's spinners do not work as hard or as smartly as they did. In the last decade or so, I have rarely seen a slow bowler at first class level or below, who bowls for a couple of hours on the trot at the nets. A VV Kumar or a Prasanna thought nothing of three hours of bowling everyday. And they loved every minute of it. It took quite a bit to separate a cricket ball from me, or my many contemporaries, once one of us grabbed one to bowl in the nets. A net practice session was a dress rehearsal for a match; imaginary fields were set to the batsmen who were challenged to score or defend against such fields, making it all very competitive.

The most important quality of a spinner is the ability to spin the ball. Once spinning ability is developed and sharpened, the other aspects of slow bowling may be cultivated over time, but the reverse will be impossible to achieve. In the contemporary game, boys start specializing very early, playing competitive cricket from the under-12 age group onwards. It's too early to start spinning the ball; it's in fact too early for any specialization. For all he knows, a boy may have the makings of a fast bowler or may shoot up by the time he is 16 or so, completely unsettling his bowling arc. Most bowlers of my generation began to specialize only after 16, when their fingers and limbs were relatively well developed, and they could impart spin effectively.

Today's young spinners often lack confidence. One possible cause could be the surfeit of advice and coaching they receive in their formative years. In old-fashioned parenting, there was much benign neglect, which enabled boys to be left pretty much alone. Young cricketers too enjoyed the luxury of benign neglect and thus retained their natural ability well into adulthood. Today, a talented spinner is unfortunately taken into hand by well-intentioned mentors who are frankly not up to the job. The resultant confusion in the young spinner's mind is not easily undone.

The accumulated wisdom of a couple of generations of quality spinners has somehow failed to percolate to the present one. Perhaps the charisma of Kapil Dev Nikhanj shifted the attention away from spin bowling and led to the emergence of good medium pacers instead.

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