All Ten: The Ultimate Bowling Feat

262 Dev and Fergie Gupte, the only bowlers who had previously taken nine in an innings for India. Unfortunately for Kumble his last two successes had been with the last two balls of the over and Javagal Srinath now had a whole over at Waqar Younis. Fortunately for Kumble his captain, Mohammad Azharuddin, quietly suggested to Srinath that he bowl off the stumps. Perhaps he should also have spoken to Waqar since the great fast bowler proceeded to play a number of wild shots that might just have spoiled things. However he survived and Kumble got his chance. Wasim kept out Kumble’s second hat-trick ball of the innings, and one more, and then propping forward was caught at short leg by V.V.S. Laxman. India had won by 212 runs. The celebrations were a little more frenetic than those at Old Trafford just over 40 years previously as Kumble was chaired off and the 25,000 crowd, together with those watching from unofficial vantage points outside, went wild. After going for 37 runs in his first eight overs his next 19 had gone for the same number of runs and yielded all ten wickets. Five of Kumble’s victims had been caught close in as the batsmen failed to cope with the variable bounce; the other wickets had needed no help from the fielders. A remarkable feature of Laker’s all-ten against Australia was Lock’s failure to strike at the other end and we might also wonder that three bowlers who between them would finish with 749 Test wickets for India would similarly go wicketless whilst Kumble created history. Kumble’s match figures of 14 for 149 had only been bettered twice by an Indian in Test cricket. (Two weeks later against a Pakistan team including eight of the same players he took one for 139!) One of the spectators was Richard Stokes, an Englishman now living in Germany who was in New Delhi on business. Remarkably as a ten-year-old, taken there by his father, he had also been at Old Trafford in 1956 to see Jim Laker take all-ten against Australia. Thanks to the wonders of Youtube those of us who weren’t at either match can at least compare and contrast the performances online. Kumble’s first-class career lasted another ten years. By now India’s captain, fittingly his last match, the Third Test against Australia at the end of October 2008, was played at the scene of his all-ten. Unfortunately a nasty hand injury sustained during the match hastened his decision to retire. Again at the end of the match he was carried off the field by team-mates. Kumble was a brave cricketer: his last Test wicket, the hard-hitting Mitchell Johnson caught and bowled, was taken whilst he bowled with 11 stitches in the little finger of his left hand. Six years earlier at St John’s, Antigua, after having had his jaw broken by West Indies quickie Mervyn Dillon he had batted on for four overs and then, swathed in head bandages, bowled 14 overs the next day and dismissed Brian Lara before flying home for surgery. Less obviously charismatic than Murali and Warne, Kumble was sometimes perhaps underrated as a bowler. His career figures and the longevity of his career are however the perfect rejoinder to any doubters. He was very Anil Kumble