🇮🇳 Anil Kumble

Anil Kumble was born in Bengaluru on 17 October 1970 to a middle-class Brahmin family. His father was a businessman in pharmaceuticals; his mother a homemaker. He studied mechanical engineering at the Rashtreeya Vidyalaya College of Engineering and was, for several years, expected by his family to become a corporate engineer like his older brother. He did not. He played for Karnataka in domestic cricket while completing his degree, and at twenty he was selected for the India ODI side. His Test debut followed in 1990. He was tall — six feet one — and his action was unusual: he ran in a long, loping, semi-side-on approach and propelled the ball with a near-medium pacer's wrist snap rather than a classical leg-spinner's tweak. The ball did not turn much. It did, however, bounce and skid and pitch on the seam and almost never miss the stumps.

His 1999 ten-wicket spell against Pakistan at the Feroz Shah Kotla remains one of the few cricket achievements that has its own Wikipedia article. The match itself had been finely poised; Pakistan needed 420 to win in the fourth innings, and at lunch on day five they were 101 for 0, comfortable. Kumble came on after lunch and took two wickets in his first over. He kept bowling, into the wind, for three and a half hours, on a pitch that was offering him almost nothing. Wicket after wicket. The crowd grew quiet, then noisy, then quiet again as the realization spread that he was approaching the once-in-a-generation mark. Javagal Srinath, India's strike bowler from the other end, deliberately bowled wide of off stump to deny Pakistan any chance of escaping Kumble. The tenth wicket — Waseem Akram caught at short leg — came in his 26.3rd over. Kumble's figures, 26.3 overs, 9 maidens, 74 runs, 10 wickets, are statistically the most freakish spell of leg-spin in the modern game.

If the perfect ten established him, the 2002 Antigua Test established what he was as a person. Mervyn Dillon hit him on the jaw with a bouncer in the morning session; the X-rays showed a fracture, and the team doctor told him he could not play any further part in the match. Kumble disagreed. He had his jaw strapped up, returned to the field, and bowled fourteen consecutive overs at Brian Lara, taking the wicket of the West Indian captain. The video of him bowling with the bandage wrapped around his head, the lower half of his face encased in white tape, is the single most-shared image in Indian cricket. After the over he flew home for surgery. He once told an interviewer, years later: 'I could bowl. I could not eat. I would have to fast for two months anyway. It seemed wasteful not to keep bowling.'

He captained India in 14 Tests, beginning at age 36, in conditions where Indian captains traditionally lose: away series in Australia. His captaincy was austere and engineering-grade. He did not give speeches. He did not lose his temper. His handling of the Monkeygate controversy in 2008 — when his teammate Harbhajan Singh was accused of racially abusing Andrew Symonds — was firm and statesmanlike; he refused to compromise on team unity even when threatened with the Test being abandoned. India did not win the series, but Kumble emerged as the only Indian cricketer in modern memory who had stood his ground against the Australian board.

He retired from Test cricket in 2008 with 619 Test wickets — at that time second only to Shane Warne and Muttiah Muralitharan, and still by some distance the most by any Indian. He has since served as the chairman of the ICC Cricket Committee, as the head coach of the Indian team, and as the principal partner of a sports-technology firm called Spektacom that builds the sensor-equipped bat handles used in the IPL. He is the most underappreciated Indian cricketer of his generation, partly because he played in the same era as Tendulkar, Dravid and Ganguly, and partly because his bowling style — workmanlike, accurate, almost engineering-grade — never carried the romance of classical leg-spin. He took 619 wickets anyway. Numbers do not need to be romantic to be definitive.

He is married to Chethana, has two daughters, and runs the Anil Kumble Foundation, which works on biodiversity conservation in the Western Ghats. He is, even by his teammates' admission, the most reserved man in Indian cricket — but if you bring up Antigua 2002, his face changes, the engineering brain flickers, and he will, after a long pause, say only: 'It was a Test match. I had a job to do.' He did the job, with a broken jaw, for fourteen overs. Indians of a certain generation will tell you that is when they understood what a Test cricketer is supposed to be.