The no-balls Ishant Sharma bowled in the first Test match was the only issue in an impressive bowling performance by the Indians at Adelaide. (AP Photo/James Elsby)When all the batsmen at the nets were obsessed with their back-foot, anticipating devilish Perth bounce, Ishant Sharma was fretting over his front-foot. As soon as he would complete his follow-through, he would lumber back to the crease and inspect the stud-marks. Fellow seamer Jasprit Bumrah saw the funny side of it. “Sab teek hain Ishant bhai?” he asked. Ishant just gave him a cold stare.
But Ishant no-balling has been as much as his own obsession as Australia’s. Reams of newsprint have already been devoted to Ishant. One of the newspapers carried a report saying Ishant had over-stepped 20 times, another suggested inspecting the replays of every dismissal, one even dusted up his old spell against Ricky Ponting, saying he had no-balled then as well.
In short, the only aspect they could nit-prick on this Indian bowling cartel was Ishant’s no-balling. It’s another way of putting that the Indian seamers are getting noticed, as much as or even more than their batsmen, which is a historical aberration in Australia.
Rarely has there been so much attention on Indian bowlers. They’d been explosive ones, crafty ones and industrious ones, but not with such combined gifts, competent enough to put the opposition bowlers to shade. Rarer still is the fixation and excitement bestowed on any bunch of bowlers since the halcyon days of the Caribbean masters, who bossed over their batsmen and made their Aussie counterparts look considerably inferior. Not even several generations of Pakistani bowlers could leave these shores with the reputation intact. The batch of 1999 that toured these shores supposedly matched the Aussies, but Shoaib Akhtar, Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis, returned empty-handed, with a 3-0 drubbing.
The disparity between the bowlers of both sides was not daylight stark, if you observe closely Australian bowlers didn’t bowl as badly as has been bandied about. Mitchell Starc, perhaps, was a letdown, unable to generate his usual pace and seam movement. Pat Cummins got a little overawed and the workload eventually took a toll on Josh Hazlewood’s accuracy.
But in a match dictated by slim margins, Indian seamers walked away with the finer margins. Like sustaining a better length and line with the new-ball. According to CricViz, as much as 56 percentage of Ishant’s deliveries in the first 30 overs were on good length and on the fourth-fifth stump. Jasprit Burmah and Mohammed Shami follow him, with 47 and 45.20 respectively. The corresponding numbers of Hazlewood, Cummins and Starc read 21.70.
Moreover, Ishant procured more movement than all of them — .8 degree of swing and .7 degree of seam deviation. In pace and economy rate, Australia was slightly better.
In this regard, India were consistently hostile, their intensity unrelenting even in their third spell. Maybe, Adelaide was more like Ahmedabad or Nagpur, and Indian seamers are accustomed to bowling on bone-dry strips back, where they have to rely on discipline, patience and nous, besides pace, variety.
Australians, conversely, were a bit distressed after not getting much help off the surface, and it transpired into flatlining. As one Australian commentator put it, “The difference was their cutting edge.”
Starc faces scrutiny
That the Aussies were smarting from the wounds manifested in the practice sessions. At the nets of Thursday, the under-scrutiny Starc was all fire and brimstone, hustling bats, beating them and thwacking stumps, like he had miraculously transformed into a Mitchell Johnson without a moustache in the terrifying summer of 2013-14.
As was Cummins, gliding in and racking up extreme pace. Even the normally cheerful Hazlewood was heated and animated, as if keen to prove their superiority over the visitors, thus magnificently sets up the prologue for the maiden Test in the stiflingly magnificent Optus Stadium on a supposedly bouncier, pacier, WACA-replica surface.
A straight shootout between two highly-skilled, competitive fast-bowling cartels-as Justin Langer call them.
But gone are the days Indian skippers trembled at the sight of grass and the forecast of unnerving bounce — some of their batsmen might still feel sweaty, but not Kohli, who has been empowered as much as emboldened by arguably the finest group of pacers to have emerged from the country. He calls it a mere happenstance- “not that I scouted them from around the country”-but the effectiveness of his bowlers has erased the dread of green tracks.
On the contrary, it excites him. “We are very excited, lots of grass on the pitch. Our bowlers will come into play. There is a chance for result, just got to be positive. In the Johannesburg Test, to see (the pitch) seemed difficult but we won. It was the worst track I’ve ever played on and if we can there I thought we can anywhere,” he says.
Not only Johannesburg, most of India’s overseas victories in this century were wrought on bowling-friendly conditions, be it Headingley, Harare, Johannesburg (2006), Kingston, Durban, Lord’s or Nottingham. Only that Kohli’s predecessors were not blessed with such depth, variety and quality in bowling stock.
Nor the consistency-no Indian team abroad has managed to bowl their opponents twice in 10 matches as has Kohli’s bravura brigade. “As I said if you don’t get 20 wickets you don’t win a Test match, regardless of whether you scored 600 or 700 or 800. It is insignificant. If you get 300 on the board and you have guys who can get 20 wickets then you are fine as a team,” he said.
It’s what great bowling units can do to a team-they efface the caginess, elevate the energy levels, win matches and make the adversaries nit-prick on trivialities.
It’s also what digs the foundation of cricketing dynasties.
