NEWS
Follow UsIn a completely surprising move, Ravichandran Ashwin, one of India’s greatest match-winners, has decided to pull the curtains on his international career immediately. After not getting an opportunity at Perth, Ashwin was picked for the Adelaide Test, where he didn't have much opportunities to have a say on the clash. Ashwin, who has 537 Test wickets at an average of 24.00, ends his career after having two unsatisfactory series against Bangladesh and New Zealand at home.
But that wouldn’t dent his legacy one bit.
Ashwin ended up as India’s second-highest wicket-taker in Test cricket and a career so decorated that India didn’t lose a single series at home between 2012 and 2024. The streak ended against New Zealand, but that was perhaps the first series Ashwin failed to deliver at home. He was a freak who could bowl insanely long overs and always kept the opposition in check. On top of having a stellar bowling record, Ashwin has scored 3503 runs in the longest format of the game, with six centuries and 14 half-centuries to go with it.
"I don't want to make it about myself. This is my last day as an international cricketer. I have created a lot of memories. We are the last bunch of OGs in the dressing room. I have a lot of people to thank… BCCI, my fellow teammates, all the coaches. This will be my last day as an India international cricketer. I will play club cricket. I had a lot of fun," Ashwin said during India's post-match press conference in Brisbane.
"I have made a lot of memories alongside Rohit [Sharma] and several of my team-mates, even though we've lost some of them [to retirements] over the last few years. We're the last bunch of OGs, we can say that. I will be marking this as my date of having played at this level.
"Obviously, there are a lot of people to thank, but I will be failing in my duties if I didn't thank the BCCI and fellow team-mates. I want to name a few of them, some of the coaches [also] who have been part of the journey. Most importantly, Rohit, Virat [Kohli], Ajinkya [Rahane], [Cheteshwar] Pujara, who have taken some of the catches around the bat and given me the number of wickets I've managed to get over the years."
The Tamil Nadu spinner holds the record for most Player of the Series awards (11), the most five-wickets-in-an-innings in a career (37), the fastest to 350 Test wickets, and many more in Test cricket, but his biggest legacy would be the belief that he gave Indian team on how everything would be alright as long as he is there on the field. The same trust never transpired to foreign lands but Ashwin continued to be at his best when it came to managing workload and always ready to scramble.
With Ashwin now 38 and age slowly taking over, it was inevitable that India were looking at a transition, integrating the likes of Kuldeep Yadav and Washington Sundar for a more regular role. With India’s next Test assignment coming in late 2025 after the Border-Gavaskar Trophy, Ashwin’s decision seems to have been coming from that perspective.
It's not only Test cricket, Ashwin has also retired from ODIs and T20Is. First pigeonholed as a limited-overs bowler, Ashwin had a start-stop career in white-ball cricket, and his appearance became sporadic after the rise of Kuldeep Yadav and Yuzvendra Chahal in 2017. He returned to the T20I squad in 2021 and was named in the ICC ODI World Cup in 2023 but never really cemented his spot.
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