Chandra: India's leg-spin magician

HALL OF FAME: Bhagwat Chandrasekhar looked like a bank teller but wove magic on the cricket pitch...

Leg-spin was not fashionable in Australia in 1977. Kerry O'Keefe was the best of the locals, but his bowling then was nowhere near as much fun as his radio commentary now, plus he'd gone to the WSC wastelands. The leading exponent eligible for Test duty was Tony Mann, a battler. Turning the ball from leg was a dead art in this country.

Then the Indians arrived for the 1977-78 tour. Their squad was studded with brilliance and boasted no fewer than four first-rate spinners. Skipper Bishen Bedi was left-arm orthodox. The extravagantly named Srinivasaraghavan Venkataraghavan and the portly Erapalli Anatharao Srinivas Prasanna bowled off-breaks.

But the crowing glory of that exotic party was Bhagwat Subramanya Chandrasekhar. Chandra. A leggie. He looked and bowled like a magician, and completely captured my youthful imagination.

His bowling action was like that of a medium pacer: gathering at the crease, delivering from very close to the stumps, and bringing his arm over high, straight and quick. He could deviate the ball off the pitch in either direction using, it seemed, a combination of prestidigitation and sub-continental guile. In those innocent days before super slo-mo's and Warnie and coaching instructions on 'The Cricket Show' in Test lunchbreaks, breaking the ball both ways seemed a miraculous act. He could also, on occasion, make his top-spinner rear like an angry dog. I longed to be able to do what he did.

It turned out to be one of the great series. Bob Simpson's Australia scraped home in the first two Tests, winning at Brisbane by 16 runs and at the WACA by two wickets. At the MCG (with Sunil Gavaskar, no less, taking the new ball in order to remove some shine before the spinners got to work) the Indians triumphed by 222 runs, then they squared the series by spanking the hosts by more than an innings in Sydney. The clinching Test, at Adelaide, saw Australia prevail by 47.

Bedi was the leading wicket-taker of the series with 31, but Chandra was the eye-catcher. He snared 28 wickets at 25.14, although it was the artistry rather than the effectiveness that made him so exciting. The other side of his cricketing equation – batting – was also on full display. He made four runs, highest score two, for a series average of 0.66. On his departure from these shores he was presented with a bat with a hole in the middle of it.

The beguiling backstory to Chandra was that polio withered his right wrist when he was young. This was a factor in both his whippy action – some said it enabled him to deliver his superior toppie – and his abysmal batting. He took 242 wickets in his 58 Tests and made just 167 runs.

At The Oval in 1971 he claimed 6/38 to bowl his country to a series win. At the MCG in 1977-78 he had match figures of 12/104. He could be loose and expensive, but on his day he was near unplayable. Indeed, Viv Richards ranked Chandra alongside Dennis Lillee as the two most difficult bowlers he ever faced.

Even when he was an international star Chandra continued to work in a bank. With his sleeves buttoned to the wrist, his lustrous head of hair and his slim physique he looked a bit like a teller wandering about the field. But then he would be tossed the ball, stalk back on his improbably long run-up, hurry through his paces ... and he was a conjurer, a tormentor, an entertainer. A banker no more.

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