RP Singh: Two Great Summers and a Long Afterwards

Between September 2007 and May 2009, Rudra Pratap Singh was one of the most effective white-ball bowlers in the world. He took twelve wickets at the inaugural T20 World Cup, second-most in the tournament, at an average of 12.66, and three of them in the final. Twenty months later he took twenty-three wickets in a season of the IPL to win the Purple Cap for a Deccan Chargers side that won the title from nowhere.

He was twenty-three years old when the second of those finished. He played international cricket for another two years, took nothing much, and spent the rest of the decade being picked in the hope that the bowler from those two summers might come back. He never did. Careers that peak that early and that hard are common enough in fast bowling; what makes RP Singh's worth writing about is how precisely you can identify what he had, and therefore what he lost.

What made him good

RP Singh was a left-arm fast-medium bowler from Raebareli in Uttar Pradesh, and his method rested on one thing: he swung the new ball back into the right-hander, late and at a pace fast enough that the batter had to commit before it moved. Left-arm over, ball angling in from wide, then swinging further in. Against a right-handed top order it is the hardest single delivery in seam bowling to leave alone, and RP Singh could produce it repeatedly when the ball was hard.

It is a young bowler's skill and a specific one. It depends on a whippy action, on wrist position, and on the ball doing something in the air, and all three of those are the first things to go when a fast bowler's body starts negotiating. He had no great slower ball, no reverse-swing weapon at pace, and no plan B once the shine was off. What he had, at his best, hardly needed one.

Johannesburg, 2007

The 2007 World Twenty20 was played by a young India side that had been sent to South Africa partly because the senior players did not much want to go, and RP Singh, at twenty-one, was central to it in a way nobody had forecast. He took twelve wickets in seven matches. In the Super Eights against South Africa he took 4 for 13 in four overs, a spell that eliminated the hosts from their own tournament.

Then the final, against Pakistan at the Wanderers on 24 September, defending 157. He bowled four overs for 26 and took three wickets, including a nineteenth over that removed Umar Gul and left Pakistan needing thirteen from the last six balls with one wicket standing. Joginder Sharma bowled that last over and got the wicket that ended it, and the photograph everyone remembers is of Misbah-ul-Haq scooping to short fine leg. But India won by five runs, and of the five bowlers who mattered, RP Singh conceded the second-fewest and took equal-most.

His T20 international record never grew much beyond that fortnight — ten matches in all, fifteen wickets at 15.00, the best in the format of any India bowler with a comparable sample. He played his last one in June 2009.

The 2009 season, and a title nobody expected

The 2009 IPL was played in South Africa at short notice because of the Indian general election, on pitches that offered seamers more than Indian grounds did. Deccan Chargers had finished last in 2008 with three wins from fourteen. They won the tournament.

RP Singh took twenty-three wickets in sixteen matches to lead the competition and win the Purple Cap. South African conditions and a new white ball were the exact circumstances his bowling was designed for, and he exploited them for six weeks alongside Adam Gilchrist's batting and a Deccan side that had spent a year being a punchline. It remains one of the more improbable title runs in the tournament's history, and its most consistent performer was a bowler who has never won a Purple Cap before or since.

His full IPL career reads 67 wickets from 60 matches at 25.15, economy 7.84, and the shape of it matters: a very large share of those wickets belongs to 2008 and 2009. After Deccan he moved through Kochi Tuskers Kerala in 2011, Mumbai Indians in 2012 for $600,000, Royal Challengers in 2013 for $400,000, and Rising Pune Supergiant in 2016 — seven franchises in total, which is the auction repeatedly betting on a bowler's best years returning and repeatedly losing the bet.

The Test career, and the recall that closed it

The international record outside those two summers is harder reading. Fourteen Tests, forty wickets at 42.05 with a best of 5 for 59. Fifty-eight one-day internationals, sixty-nine wickets at 33.95. Both are the figures of a bowler who was good enough to be picked and never good enough to be certain, in an India attack that across the same years contained Zaheer Khan, Ishant Sharma, Munaf Patel and Praveen Kumar.

The ending was unusually public. In August 2011, with India being beaten 4-0 in England and Zaheer Khan injured, the selectors flew RP Singh in as a replacement. He had not played a Test in three years. He had not been playing much cricket of any kind. He took one wicket in the match at The Oval, bowled visibly short of pace and rhythm, and was widely and fairly criticised — less for his own performance than for the selection logic that produced it, which appeared to be that somebody had to be sent and he was available. It was his last Test. A one-day international against England the following month was his last international appearance.

His first-class record — 94 matches, 301 wickets at 30.57 — is the least discussed part of his career and the one that best shows what he was over a full working life: a genuinely good domestic seamer who had two extraordinary years inside it.

The specific thing that goes

There is a temptation to write RP Singh's decline as a story about attitude or fitness, and the record does not really support it. The more honest reading is technical, and it is common among bowlers with his profile.

Inswing to the right-hander at pace is a narrow, fragile asset. It requires the seam presented consistently, the wrist behind the ball, and enough speed that the movement happens too late to adjust to. Lose two or three miles an hour — which every fast bowler does between twenty-two and twenty-six, and faster if the body has been managed badly — and the same delivery becomes a half-pace ball swinging in from a predictable angle, which is a full toss on the pads waiting to happen. How swing actually works is unforgiving in this way: the margin between an unplayable ball and a bad one is a few kilometres per hour and a wrist position, and neither is recoverable by trying harder.

RP Singh also never developed the compensations. The bowlers who last are the ones who add something in their late twenties, a cutter or a wide yorker or the ability to reverse an old ball, so that the loss of the original weapon is survivable. He had built everything on the new ball and the swing, and when those left, there was nothing behind them.

What the career is worth

He retired in September 2018, at thirty-two, having not played international cricket for seven years. The obituaries wrote themselves as a story of unfulfilled promise, and that framing is not wrong so much as ungenerous.

The plain fact is that RP Singh took three wickets in the final of a World Cup that India won and which changed the economics of the sport more than any match of the last twenty years, and then took more wickets than anyone in an IPL season his team won from last place. Very few bowlers own both a Purple Cap and a three-wicket haul in a World Cup final. Careers are usually judged by the flat middle, and his was long and ordinary. They are remembered by the peaks, and his were as high as almost anybody's for a while.