The kind of form that R Ashwin is at the moment, he can get a pebble to spin on a concrete slab. In a career of 32 Test matches spread over 11 series (minimum two matches), the Indian off-spinner now has five Man of the Series awards. His latest one: in the Freedom Trophy 2015-16 for a tally of 31 wickets at 11.12 with four five-wicket hauls, and 101 vital runs in the lower-order, including a half-century. When they went into the final Test, in Delhi, the series was in India’s bag. Ashwin was going through a tough time personally, as his home city, Chennai, grappled with massive flood, and he lost contact with his family for a couple of days. Ashwin put the grief aside, scored a gritty 56 in the first innings, and wrapped up the series with a five-for in the fourth. The magnitude of Ashwin’s 49.1-26-61-5 goes further high considering the situation of the match. The South African batsmen displayed the most epic form of obduracy, maintaining a rate of one run per over throughout the innings, dead-batting everything that the Indian bowlers dished out at them. With four wickets needed to seal the Test match in the last session, there was one man named AB de Villiers standing between India and victory. He had plotted his bat into his crease for 296 balls, lifting it only occasionally, for his 43 runs. But Ashwin removed it for good, with a viciously turning off-spinner. That wicket all but sealed the deal for India. Minutes later, Virat Kohli’s young Team India resembled a bunch of kids who just finished their last day in school before the summer vacation. The joy was a reflection of how hard they fought to make it 3-0. In a chat with BCCI.TV, the hero of India’s series triumph, R Ashwin, tried to put the emotion in words. He explained his bowling plans on the tough final two days of the Test and revelled in his fifth Man of the Series award. It is amazing how this Test panned out, isn’t it? The pace of the game kept changing. We won the series in Nagpur but wanted to come to Delhi and make it 3-0. On the second day we folded them out for 121 and it looked like things will be easy. But we knew that the wicket is going to get slower and the fizz was going to go away from it. Yesterday (day-four) Hashim and AB were batting rigidly, they were fighting hard and weren’t ready to give it away. That’s how the best teams are. But we stuck in there, kept giving our best, and in the end, the amount of effort we put in eventually bore results for us. Defeating the best team in the world so comprehensively – can you put that emotion in words? When we got that last wicket, we could not express ourselves. It was amazing! Everybody was hugging each other and we don’t even remember what we were all doing out there. Having beaten a team like South Africa, we have set on a wonderful journey. I am sure our better days as a team are ahead of us. We will tour overseas soon and I am very hopeful that we will be on the right track there as well. I want to congratulate all the boys who have been on this journey with me. To get another Man of the Series award – I was craving for it, but I didn’t know it will come so soon again, after Sri Lanka. As a bowling unit, how difficult is it when the batsmen have made up their minds to block everything in their sight? First things first, you have got to give credit where it is due. They shut shop and showed a lot of discipline. But while they were defending everything, the defence wasn’t that great. If there was a bit more bounce or fizz in the wicket, we might have had an edge here and there. Having said that, they assessed the conditions very well; they were very dogged in their defence. They wanted to bring something out of us. All through the series I was there and thereabouts and wasn’t giving anything away. But this innings demanded something more and I was trying to mix it up a bit. I was lobbing an odd full-toss and giving them one up there to get them into the driving mode and see if I can get a nick. Jaddu was at his best, bowling the same length all through the game. I tried and adapted myself much better this time because there was nothing in the wicket and even the ball hitting the glove was dropping. To get the batsmen out when they are adamantly defending everything is very tough. So, we had to be imaginative, as we discussed this morning, and I thought my imagination came through in the end. Everything was being tried. The batsmen bowled, you bowled leg-spinners round the wicket and fast bowlers were asked to come round the wicket to create some roughs for the spinners. We had to try something out; the situation demanded it. They pulled us out from the zone that we were in for the last couple of games – credit to them for doing it – and so we had to come out with something different. That is what champions are made of – the ability to find a way when pushed out of comfort zone. We asked the fast bowlers to bowl from round the wicket to create roughs outside the off-stump, and it was a success to a great extent. We wanted to put the doubt in the batsman’s mind that there was something there in the pitch. It didn’t bring us a lot of wickets but at least we tried. But that one spell from Umesh after tea and my ball to get AB de Villiers really folded up the day for us.