Was Anil Kumble really a “tail-killer”?

Comparisons with the contemporary

Anil Kumble and Harbhajan Singh were India's deadly spin duo

An interesting picture emerges when we compare the bowling figures of Jumbo with another great spin bowler who bowled alongside him, Harbhajan Singh. The Punjabi off-spinner dismissed 151 tail-enders out of his 417 total wickets, taking his percentage of lower-order wickets to 36%. While this number is greater than that Kumble, another layer of statistics is needed to appreciate the true worth of the leggie.

In Kumble’s 132 Test matches, Indian bowling attack dismissed 566 tail-enders in total. Kumble accounted for 201 of them; the percentage comes to 35.5%. Similarly, Harbhajan in span his career witnessed 474 tail-enders dismissed by the team, out of which he sent back 151, the percentage is 31.8%, nearly four per cent less than Anil Kumble.

Comparing with other legends

Top five bowlers in Test cricket

While Anil Kumble emerges as the clear leader when it comes to cleaning up the tail for India, the international scene throws up a different scenario. Here is how other legends line up.

The table shows that while the pace bowlers languish by a clear margin, the other spin bowlers were more lethal than Anil Kumble. Shane Warne leads the tally with his leg-spin wizardry (263 wickets) and the magician Muralitharan is not too far behind with 260 wickets of the lower-order.

However, we once again apply the same metric which we applied to Harbhajan Singh. Shane Warne is his career confronted 766 tail-enders of which he dismissed 263, thus his percentage of getting rid of the tail comes to be 34.33%, less than Kumble. Muralitharan, on the other hand, was extremely effective against the bottom order. In 565 opportunities, Murali snatched 260 wickets thus accounting for 46.01% of the tail-enders.

So in conclusion, Anil Kumble is the most devastating Indian bowler when it comes to cleaning up the tail. His high count of bowled and LBW dismissals prove the fact that Kumble did not give much of a chance to the lower order batsmen. When it comes to top-wicket takers, Kumble is eclipsed only by Muralitharan who was a freak spinner.