The 1960s and the 1970s weren’t a great time to be a spinner in India, aspiring to play for the country, for no fault of theirs.

A venerable, supremely skilled and uncompromisingly aggressive quartet of contrasting styles and crafts ruled the roost. The classical off-spinner EAS Prasanna and his left-handed mirror image, Bishan Singh Bedi.

The professorial S Venkataraghavan. The maverick game-changer, leg-spinner supreme BS Chandrasekhar. Each a master, each a humongous threat in his own right but also feeding off one another, complementing rather than competing with each other.

A plethora of exceptional talent bided its time, often without success – Rajinder Goel (750 first-class wickets).

Padmakar Shivalkar (589). Rajinder Hans (340). These are names that roll off the tongue. And then there was Dilip Doshi, that wonderful practitioner of left-arm spin who was forced to operate in the giant shadow of Bedi, until finally being rewarded for his patience and perseverance with a Test debut three months short of his 32nd birthday.

In a classic tribute to that oft-abused cliché ‘making up for lost time’, Doshi made an instant impact, taking six for 103 from 43 tireless overs in his first bowl in Test cricket, against Australia in Chennai in September 1979.

He backed it up with two for 64 in the second innings in a drawn encounter, a foretaste of what was to come for the next four years.

Source: Huindustan times