RP Swing: The story of the man who starred in India’s 2007 World T20 triumph

It will soon be 10 years since Joginder Sharma bowled that over and Misbah-ul-Haq played that shot. Like RP says, it has been a while since he shepherded India’s dramatic title triumph, finishing as his team’s leading wicket-taker in the tournament with a crucial three-wicket burst to boot in the final. But his surprise has nothing to do with the time lapse. If anything it stems from being reminded about a period of his international career that isn’t The Oval Test of 2011. It’s an embarrassing misadventure that has after all become the defining if not lasting image of RP Singh and his international career. To the extent that his doomed Test return ended up smudging if not blurring whatever else he did as an India player.

It’s a pity really. For, close to a year-and-a-half from say mid-2006 to early 2008, RP was the man. And the World T20 apart, it was the lanky left-armer who starred in every major overseas Test win during a ground-breaking era in Indian cricket where the team finally shed the tag of being poor travellers.

It ranged from winning the man-of-the-match award on debut at Faisalabad to championing historic wins at Trent Bridge and Perth. It was a period where his regular victims included the who’s who of the batting elite, from Kevin Pietersen and Adam Gilchrist to Michael Hussey. At one stage, he held the best-ever strike-rate—that of 49.7—for any Indian fast bowler in Test history. That’s not all. He led the wicket-taking charts when Deccan Chargers won the IPL in 2009. And here he is, having played an integral role in Gujarat having clinched their maiden Ranji Trophy title.

Yet, the scenes that immediately come to mind when you mention RP Singh are those from the fateful morning on a cloudy summer day in London, where he ambled in, looking overweight and out of sorts before delivering one of the more innocuous first balls of a match in Test cricket—down the pads and on the third-bounce to MS Dhoni. As if the rest never happened.

Sport can be very cruel on occasions. One bad performance can often end up being an equal measure of everything else you’ve achieved. Ask RP. Nearly six years on, he admits that The Oval Test pretty much shut the door on his career in the longest format. “It left a dhabba (stamp) on me. That’s why I didn’t play a Test I think after that. I keep playing domestic cricket, I take wickets, but mauka nahi milta. Maybe they just decided that I looked unfit in that match so I was no longer up to the mark at that level,” he says now.

His insipid performance and the whole shock surrounding his selection led to inevitable conspiracy theories. There were even suggestions that he landed in London straight from vacationing in the USA. RP smiles but fails to hide his annoyance when reminded of the drama or “hungama” as he puts it that welcomed him at The Oval.

“The truth is I was in Delhi doing my usual off-season training. I have been to the USA a few times but not back then. There was a lot of rain in Delhi that year and I hadn’t gotten a chance to bowl. I used to stay in the Air-India colony back then, which had bad mobile signal. I got an early morning call on my land-line from a selector informing me that I had been picked. I was naturally excited,” he says.

RP doesn’t shy away from admitting that for all the controversy that emanated from his recall, it came down eventually to a poor performance on his part. But he does reveal to have been undercooked in his preparation. “I would have preferred better preparation but in that excitement I just thought wahan jaake dekhenge. The fact is I didn’t perform the way I should have. I only wish my recall had come when the season was on or when I was playing regularly. Maybe my career would have lasted for much longer,” adds RP.

What didn’t help him either was his well-publicized closeness to then skipper Dhoni, and the alleged role it played especially in him being picked in the playing XI ahead of Munaf Patel, who’d been part of the squad from the start of the tour. Not only was RP routinely spotted with Dhoni off the field—some news channels even running ten-minute visuals celebrating their ‘friendship’—the Uttar Pradesh-bred seamer had also become his captain’s go-to man in the field. For good reason as well. RP was the one who Dhoni turned to whenever he needed an incisive spell or a breakthrough. And more often than not, he delivered. As a fast bowler, RP ticked all the boxes. He moved the ball around, had decent pace and even a sharp bouncer that once got the better of Adam Gilchrist. And more often than not he hit the wicket-taking length with the new-ball, which was one of the key reasons for him being a shoo-in for most of India’s playing XIs in the mid-noughties. He also had an uncomplicated bowling action that he could repeat at will. But his greatest weapon was a vicious in-swinger that not only angled in sharply but also late. It was good enough to have both Michael Vaughan and Matt Prior bowled through the gate and Pietersen trapped lbw in both innings of the Trent Bridge Test—once shouldering arms.

A lot about RP has changed over the years. He’s transformed from the fresh-faced boy next door to a more grizzled veteran. There’s a stubble, which is still in the process of growing out, in place now with enough specks of grey to give away the advancing years—even though he’s still just 31. And he looks lankier than he has in years.

But one thing that hasn’t changed is the incisiveness of his in-swinger. RP insists that he was born with it, that from the time he started bowling off four paces with the tennis-ball on the football field in his hometown of Raebareli, the ball always shaped into the right-hander, automatically.

“Thode cheez tum maa ke pet se laate ho. Perhaps my wrist used to push the ball and get it to swing in apne aap. The only thing I had to learn was the out-swinger and to straighten my in-swinger. As I started playing cricket at a higher level I learnt that if my in-swinger is hit to mid-wicket then it’s a bad ball, if it’s mid-on then my line’s still too straight but if it was mid-off then it was the perfect delivery. Then the wickets started coming,” says RP.

It didn’t take too long for the reserved lad from Raebareli to start turning heads. Before long he was bowling to the likes of Sachin Tendulkar and Rahul Dravid at the camp. “When I was young there was one TV in the whole mohalla. So I had no real idols to be honest. So my bowling skills really developed by bowling to the likes of Sachin and Viru pa. If I could trouble them, then I was doing something right,” he adds.

RP’s rise was rapid. He had only played a year-and-a-half of serious cricket—having started at 17 after being convinced by a friend to attend a trial in Lucknow—when he caught the eye of the national selectors. His father was a telephone operator at Indian Telephone Industries and like typical middle-class families, there wasn’t enough money on the side to be spending on indulgences like sport.

“Mohalle ki panchayat chalti rehti hai. Neighbours used to ask what he is doing playing sport? My mother used to keep telling me that in a middle-class family once you cross graduation you should be a government employee,” he says.

So, RP duly escaped to the Lucknow Sports Hostel to get away from his comfort-zone. Hostel life consists of routine and more routine. But RP only benefited from it. “Jan gan man se shuru hua aur jan gan man se khatam hua din. You met fascinating people including Olympians and Indian hockey players, kept learning good and bad. Also, if you wanted to go out in the night, how to manage the roll-call. You had to ensure when they called out for No.43, somebody makes sure to say he’s ‘present’. But we would get caught and made to run laps or murga banate the,” he recalls.

Playing for India wasn’t quite on the radar yet. Or as he puts it, “I always had the ganne ke khet to go back to if this didn’t work out.” It didn’t take long for RP to hit his stride though. He was soon spending time at the MRF Pace Foundation–memorable two-day, two–night train ride from Lucknow to Chennai in the unreserved compartment that he still raves about—and the NCA. It was his swing, though, that got him fast-tracked into national reckoning and remained his calling card throughout. The likes of Irfan Pathan and Bhuvaneshwar Kumar in later years may have gone through phases where they briefly lost their swing. But not RP.

“Playing on our black soil wickets in UP, if you can’t swing the ball you’re finished. You have to be able to get either a right-hander or a left-hander out in the slips. It’s a special relationship between your wrist and the ball. And if you aren’t practising it enough, it won’t behave the way it does generally,” he explains.

While The Oval Test might be his most calamitous moment, it was this quest to add a few yards of pace, according to RP, that punctured his Test career in the first place. That too at a time when he seemed to be at the top of his game, spearheading India’s first-ever Test win at the WACA. As it turned out, following his six-wicket match haul in Perth, he never took a Test wicket again.

“I started pushing myself and even touched 149 kph in Perth. It was exciting, hitting batsmen and bouncing out Gilchrist. I kept pushing my limits and didn’t realise what damage I was doing to my body. Out karte gaye, maza aa raha tha, push karte gaye. Eventually I broke down in the next Test in Adelaide after just four overs,” he says.

RP picks Chaminda Vaas as having been the best exponent of fast bowling from the subcontinent. The Sri Lankan, he says, kept adding a new skill once every three years and by the time it was about to phase out, he added another one. “I could never do that. Zaheer tried teaching me a lot of things but probably my action or body-strength wasn’t made to master those skills. Then you start worrying about losing your natural strength and think maybe I’m not cut out for it. I didn’t learn to bowl a cutter till two years ago. If I had added these traits quicker, maybe my career wouldn’t have been limited to 7-8 years,” he says.

These days, RP is trying to make sure that the young Gujarat bowlers learn from his errors, and keep developing their art. Already a number of them have come out and credited him to have brought in a new wave of professionalism to the dressing-room. “I got Hussey out three times with the out-swinger. But he stopped playing the drive in the second innings at Perth. I wanted to immediately shift to an in-swinger. But Anil bhai came to me and asked me to postpone that thought. He gave me the permission to bowl the in-swinger after five overs. First ball, I trapped him lbw. That’s when I learnt the art of setting up a batsman. I tried telling Jasprit Bumrah that in the Ranji semifinal and it worked perfectly,” says RP.

Even at his peak, RP remained an enigma. He had an almost apathetic presence on the field and probably it ensured that he never got his due. He went about his job with no fuss despite being India’s strike bowler. The most you got out of him was that characteristically sheepish smile.

It didn’t help that he was sharing the spotlight with the likes of Sreesanth, whose histrionics made him hard to ignore. Perhaps that’s why, once RP was out of the picture, he quickly slipped out of public awareness. So it did come as a surprise to many when he suddenly turned into an erudite analyst in the Hindi commentary box last year. “A lot of people called and said, tumhare mein itna dimaag hai pata nahi tha. Maybe, Parthiv heard me on air and said let’s pick him for Gujarat,” he quips.

RP’s pretty much covered the entire spectrum in terms of the fame and fickleness that come with being an Indian cricketer. But at the heart of it, he still remains a quintessential middle-class Raebareli boy. Yuvraj Singh once asked him to invest his money smartly and not get sucked into buying fancy cars. So he’s done just that. His hometown too has woken up gradually to the cricket star that’s emerged from their midst.

“I have never seen a poster or hoarding of me in Raebareli. My father is happy that when he goes to the bank, he’s identified as RP Singh’s dad and not made to stand in the queue. He’s happy with those chota-mota benefits,” he says.

The Oval Test not only cut RP’s career short at the highest level, but also saw a number of his close friends deserting him. He is glad to have a handful of them who still get excited and demand for a ‘party’ even when he finishes with a single wicket. For now, he’s content with being the mentor figure in a very successful domestic team but hasn’t given up hope completely of someday getting a shot at retribution, at the highest level. But till then, it’ll continue to linger as the nightmare he can never wake up from. You ask him if he’s ever managed to see any highlights of his Oval performance, and pat comes the reply. “Mein sirf acchi cheezen dekhta hoon. And I think I’ve had enough high points to make up for that one bad experience.”