The day before the IPL auction of 2012, KKR captain Gautam Gambhir made only one demand to the team management. “Even if you buy just one player make sure it’s Sunil Narine.” The management was initially skeptical, given the tendency of mystery spinners to fade away once the batsmen decoded them. “We had all seen him in the Champions League the year before and there was an element of mystery about him, but some of us still had doubts. But he kept calling me and repeated the same line,” assistant coach Vijay Dahiya had told this newspaper.
Like fireflies, they dazzle by the night and fizzle out by dawn. But Gambhir was so insistent on the Trinidadian, they eventually shelled out 10 fold his base prize and swooped him, just to please him.
In the next 13 years, Narine not only vindicated the unshakeable faith of his captain, but also has emerged as the club’s evergreen totem, arguably its most prolific cricketer, agelessly evolving with time, ceaselessly reinventing with the altering tunes of the game. So much so that he had exceeded Gambhir’s own estimations of the shy boy, who just kept smiling and nodding in his first few weeks with the franchise. Gambhir, in a promotional event, recently waxed eloquent on him: “He taught me about sacrifices. He has gone through in his jersey which no cricketer would ever go through. I have seen his fears and insecurities and how he has bounced back and emerged as the greatest bowler in the IPL.”
Numerous times was he reported for suspect action, banned from the Champions League final of 2013, he remodelled his action, shut his ears to the barbs about his allegedly “bend” arms, forsook the variations that made him an overnight sensation, revamped his craft, from the run-up to release, to such an indistinguishable degree that he is an entirely different bowler to the one that Gambhir first cast his eyes on. He has shed the mohawk, budgeted the gold chains and amulets, and eschewed the repertoire of twinkling variations. A wild goatee has sprouted. A tattoo on the neck has sprung.
Yet, he continues to decide matches. At Kotla against Delhi Capitals, the team’s playoff hanging by a slim thread, he struck 27 off 16 balls, equally edgy and thrilling, snaffled three wickets for 29 runs, and effected the run out of KL Rahul, the hosts batting mainstay, with a direct hit. His form has fluctuated this season — only 178 runs and 10 wickets — but when KKR found themselves on the precipice, Narine planted the kiss of life.
The most fascinating narrative arc of his career though has been how he has simplified himself to such an extent that he has stripped the game to its basics. His batting could fall into the tail-enders’ happy slog, all heaves, slashes and swipes. There is little pretence of convention, even though his slender frame and overlarge helmet betray his lower-order forebears. He judges the lengths, decides the shot and just swings the blade through a clean, firm line. The simplicity — and its success — makes bowlers over-think. Like the one-handed slug off Dushmantha Chameera, where his bat, coming down from a classically Caribbean high back-lift, suddenly gained speed when the ball approached him. First he betrays an impression that he is a trifle late on the ball, before his hands gain sudden speed and he has too much time to hoist the ball into the stands.
The methods have fetched him 1,712 runs, but more than three-fourth of those runs had arrived from 2017, when he began to open. As much as the runs, the pace of scoring had mattered more. His strike rate of 166.70 is better than his compatriot Kieron Pollard’s (147), Australian Glenn Maxwell (155) and just beneath fellow Knight Andre Russell (173). But add to his tally 208 wickets — the most for a single franchise, level with Nottinghamshire’s Samit Patel — and he is undoubtedly one of the finest all-rounders in the league. In the three titles his club won, Narine’s haul read 488 runs and 17 wickets (2024), 24 (2012) and 21 (2014) scalps. He is the fourth highest wicket-taker in the league too, the only one with an economy rate (6.77) of less than seven in top-10.
Few though would have purchased wickets with as many varied tools as Narine has. In the nascent days, the carrom ball stung, in the mid-phase, the flippers and sliders wreaked havoc, and in the autumnal bloom, straighter ones, off breaks and off-cutters instigated the damage. The old toy makes an occasional cameo, as Faf du Plessis discovered. It’s a different version, floatier and slower, the ball stopping than fizzing. An over-spun off-cutter consumed Axar Patel while an off-break that spat distorted the stumps of Tristan Stubbs.
The Kotla haul captured the essence of his bowling these days. As though he were on a self-demystification journey. He ambles in from a three-step run up, like reaching for a cup of coffee in the morning. The bowling arm is hidden behind the torso, just to create a make-belief air of mystery, and then loops the ball into the batsman.
The ball does nothing fantastical after landing. Most of them are loopy off-breaks that turn a smidgeon. Sporadically, for old times’ sake, he flicks a carrom-ball. The Narine of sliders and flippers, the leg-break and the wrong ones, with a bountiful bag of deception, seems a lonely planet, a fragment of a memory.
His deceit is more nuanced than nerve-bursting. This could be his story too — the mystery spinner who became a semi-orthodox off-spinner. He resorts to more conventional methods — shuffles the angles, mixes the pace, alters the degree of his loop, uses the depth and breadth of the crease, plays with the batsman’s mind, and relies on natural variations. Precision and accuracy — which were his virtues in the mystery days too — are more pronounced. And more than a decade later, Gambhir’s insistence on Narine the day before the auction of 2012 continues to pay rich dividends.
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