Dilip Doshi, the thoughtful left-arm spinner who finally broke into India’s Test side in his thirties, has died in London at the age of 77. Family friends said he had been dealing with heart problems for some time.
A late starter by international standards, Doshi still collected 114 wickets in 33 Tests between 1979 and 1983, bagging six five-fors with that classical, side-on action. He added 22 wickets in 15 one-day internationals, conceding barely four an over—tidy enough in any era. At home he turned out for Saurashtra and Bengal; in county cricket he wore the colours of Warwickshire and later Nottinghamshire.
Those raw numbers are only half the story. Doshi spent most of the 1970s stuck behind India’s celebrated spin quartet, and did not debut until he was 32. “Spin bowling is a battle of wits,” he told ESPNcricinfo back in 2008, a line that summed up his approach as well as anyone could. In Melbourne in 1981, carrying a painful broken toe, he still found enough guile to take five in the match and help script a rare Indian victory in Australia. Each evening, so the tale goes, he hooked himself up to electrodes to keep the swelling down, then wandered out the next morning as if nothing had happened.
County cricket shaped him too. At Trent Bridge he leaned on the advice of Garfield Sobers, who had turned up as overseas pro. Friends recall long nets, head cocked to one side, listening while Sobers explained trajectory and drift. Doshi noted much of it down, and some years later poured the lessons into Spin Punch, an autobiography that reads more like a long, slightly cranky conversation than a polished memoir.
By the early 1980s he had slipped quietly out of the India set-up, unhappy—he admitted later—with the way selections were being handled. The departure was brisk; the sense of unfinished business lingered. Still, he stayed close to the game, often seen at Tests, occasionally in the company of Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger, a friendship that began after a chance meeting in 1976.
Doshi is survived by his wife Kalindi, son Nayan—who spun for Surrey and Saurashtra—and daughter Vishakha. Tributes have already started to flow from former team-mates, who remember the spectacles perched on the end of his nose and the habit of folding his arms, pausing, then trying something just a touch different.
Quiet competence, stubborn honesty—both with the ball and in conversation—marked his career. Even in retirement he sounded more coach than nostalgist, forever dissecting the angles. Not everyone agreed with him, of course, but most listened. And that, in cricket as in life, tends to say plenty.
