The leftist party

The Indian domestic scene is suddenly filled with left-arm spinners, quite a change from a couple of years ago when they were thought to be a dying species. Bharat Sundaresan, in the Indian Express, asks experts why the left-armers suffered through the 90s and also profiles some of the up and coming bowlers, including Aushik Srinivas, Harmeet Singh and Dhiraj Singh.

It's equally likely that they suffered, for a large part of the decade, at the hands of India's most successful captain. All through his career, Sourav Ganguly had treated opposition left-arm spinners with such disdain that there was a theory he didn't particularly rate them very highly. Ganguly himself says it was more to do with the presence of Kumble and Harbhajan, than his disdain for the art. But with India looking for match-winning options post Kumble, Dhoni has shown no reluctance to include them in his search for a successor.