DC Edit | Ashwin retires with a spin

Many eyebrows in Indian cricket circles were raised with the news coming in from Australia on Wednesday when Ravichandran Ashwin announced his retirement from the game midway through the five-Test series. This one surely turned the other way.With 537 wickets from 106 Tests, Ashwin is India’s second-highest wicket-taker in the format, behind leg-spinner Anil Kumble. The Tamil Nadu player was handy with the bat as well, scoring 3,503 runs that included six centuries and 14 fifties.However, the 38-year-old played only one of the first three Tests in Australia, taking one for 53 in the day-night game, the second of the series, in Adelaide. He will continue to play in the cash-rich IPL and other tournaments at the club level though.That Ashwin did not field any questions after announcing his retirement at the press conference following the Brisbane Test points to the fact that there is much more than meets the eye.Captain Rohit Sharma termed Ashwin’s decision to retire “personal” and said the team think tank has had conversations around which the spinner was likely to be fielded in the playing XI.Ashwin’s reaction was that if he was not needed in the series, he was better off saying goodbye to the game.While the nature of his farewell and abrupt departure from Australia may not have satisfied the purist’s sense of a team game, nothing detracts from the enormity of his contribution to Team India over a decade and a half in which he was the principal wicket-taking spinner. He was also more than handy with the bat, even sparing the team the blushes in a recent home Test in which he got his sixth Test century.In a career with many an absence thrust upon him by selection foibles from white ball games, he was a team man to the core, always willing to fight his way back into the playing XI.