In the first Test of India’s 2018 tour to South Africa at Cape Town, the home team fielded a fast-bowling quartet of Dale Steyn, Vernon Philander, Kagiso Rabada and Morne Morkel in their playing eleven. It was a lip-smacking prospect: the most lethal possible combination of high-class exponents of seam, swing, pace, and bounce. There are few better sights in Test cricket than a fast bowler running in ball after ball and testing a batsman’s defence by making the ball talk at uncomfortably high speeds.
As soon as South Africa announced they were playing all the four quickies together, there was a sentiment of elation among cricket circles. But strangely, the focus soon shifted on the series to be played a couple of months later, when the home team was going to host Australia. Only recently having rolled over a hapless England side in the Ashes, the Australian fast-bowling trio of Pat Cummins, Josh Hazlewood and Mitchell Starc was already making big headlines. With the then injured James Pattinson soon joining forces, the four-match Test series between the two sides was perfectly set up for an enthralling contest between two enviably potent pace quartets.
It’s almost as if the Indian contingent actually playing that Test at Newlands in Cape Town had suddenly been relegated to the background. Little to the world’s notice however, a certain Jasprit Bumrah was handed his first Test cap on that day. Few could know what was to follow.
In the third and final Test of that series in South Africa, India fielded its own four-man pace attack made up of Bumrah, Mohammad Shami, Ishant Sharma and Bhuvneshwar Kumar. A green seamer at Johannesburg meant to intimidate the visitors instead came back to bite the home team as South Africans found it impossible to deal with the Indian attack that came after them relentlessly. Though the win was only a consolation – with the series having already been conceded, this Test was a precursor to what the Indian fast bowling stocks were going to look like sooner than the world would be ready for.
In the three-and-a-half years since, the same group of bowlers has conquered the Australians in their own backyard twice, looked unplayable for the most part even at home, and is currently proving to be too hot to handle for the English. The depth in quality is so great, the system is churning out fast bowlers at will and the team scripted one of its greatest wins in Brisbane earlier this year without the services of as many as four front-line pace options.
Since the start of 2018, Bumrah, Shami and Ishant have between them taken a wicket for every 22 runs conceded. With the addition of Mohammad Siraj to this lineup, there are absolutely no easy overs on offer. This depth means opposition teams do not have the luxury to play out the testing spells from the frontline bowlers and cash in against the rest. The quality never really dips and it becomes practically impossible to survive. Add Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja’s web of spin to the mix and India by far boasts of the most incisive and threatening attack in the world across conditions.
The importance of having this kind of depth is highlighted in some of India’s more famous Test wins in the recent past. At Brisbane, as India hunted down a total north of 300 batting fourth, Australia immensely suffered at the hands of Starc, taking a beating every time he came on to bowl – releasing any sense of pressure created by Cummins or Hazlewood. Even during the ongoing series, England failed to maintain the same intensity once James Anderson is pushed out of the attack and their first and second change seam options come into the equation.
The quality and depth in India’s fast-bowling stock weren’t discovered overnight though. The management has invested considerable time, money, and personnel into developing a system that not only produces these bowlers but also ensures they are ready to compete at the highest level whenever an opportunity knocks. But this wasn’t always the case.
In fact, until fairly recently, bowlers deemed good enough to play Test cricket have been found completely out of depth on difficult assignments away from home. Shami and Ishant, for instance, have been baked by the travails of those forgettable overseas tours between 2011 and 2016. Every single Indian bowler was taken to the cleaners during this phase, but they were persisted with and eventually learned the importance of finding the right balance between control and skill.
But with improved resources and more first-class games for ‘India A’ teams, the fast bowlers today take to Test cricket like veteran pros and Bumrah and Siraj’s career trajectory so far is a testament to this trend. The stereotypical image of a military medium-paced Indian pacer only keen on landing the ball in good areas and then hoping for one of the deliveries to do the trick feels buried in a past long forgotten. Indians are strong, skillful, and most importantly, actually fast now. The likes of Bumrah and Shami are perfectly capable of delivering chin music and they do not shy away from flexing this strength more often than batsmen like.
Lazy attribution
Strangely though, this paradigm shift in India’s fast-bowling culture is very lazily attributed to Kohli’s ‘fiery and intense’ brand of leadership. The labels that ideally should not mean anything outside corporate meeting rooms made of overpaid MBAs wearing expensive suits unfortunately are powerful enough to perpetuate so many wrong notions in popular discourse.
The Indian fast bowlers day in and day out deliver the goods because they’re immensely skilful at executing their jobs and not because Kohli has instilled some belief that no captain before him was capable of doing. Kohli’s camera-friendly animated gesticulations add further strength to this narrative. M.S. Dhoni’s fairly sedate and calm persona in comparison is believed to be a deterrent to the fast bowlers realising their true potential under his captaincy.
Virat Kohli after India won the second test at Lord’s against England. Photo: Twitter/@BCCI
Lazy analysis of this kind is so commonplace in mainstream cricket commentariat, fans cannot be faulted for buying into these theories. When the broadcasters repeatedly show visuals of a charged-up captain signalling his bowler to bowl a bouncer at a tail-ender and those behind the microphone explain this with unhinged verbosity, an average viewer, only casually invested in actual action, finds the narrative that it is Kohli’s aggression that percolates to the last member of his team sufficiently convincing.
It’s almost as if the success of Indian fast bowlers is entirely a function of Kohli’s effervescent machismo, whereas the truth is it is the quality of this bowling group that in part enables Kohli to carry the demeanour he does. The Indian captain’s personal brand is so overwhelming it just somehow creeps into appreciating the aspects of the team he has little influence over.
The moment Siraj sneaked one in past Anderson’s defence to complete a famous victory at Lord’s on Monday, the first words that came out of Sanjay Manjrekar’s mouth doing commentary on the Indian feed were in praise of Kohli. The first reaction on ESPNCricinfo’s Twitter feed was what a special team Kohli has built. The cameras soon panned to the captain’s exuberant celebratory routines. That four fast bowlers combined to bowl out a home team in just over 50 overs on a reasonably good batting wicket was only an additional bit of detail – considerably secondary to Kohli’s towering stardom.
Kohli has had a fairly quiet series with the bat so far, but that hasn’t stopped the cricket media from fixating on his bellicosity. And this time, the British press too has joined the bandwagon. The Guardian’s Jonathan Liew, otherwise known for his measured and sharp reading of the game, in fact, went on to attribute India’s ruthlessness under Kohli to the team’s deep admiration for the armed forces. Sure, it makes for a flattering reading in the aftermath of a special win but a few more column inches spent on describing the actual cricketing excellence displayed by India’s bowlers wouldn’t hurt too much either.
India has truly assembled a bowling juggernaut capable of winning a Test series anywhere in the world right now. It helps that their emergence has coincided with many teams around the world dipping significantly in quality. But that shouldn’t take away from the fact that this is one hell of an attack – one that Indian fans growing up had only learned to envy Australia, South Africa and the West Indies for.
With the right kind of packaging and storytelling, there’s potential here for a riveting documentary a decade or so later. But for that, the Indian cricket ecosystem will first need to allow these bowlers to emerge out of the large shadow their captain casts over the team and start celebrating their success for how remarkably special each one of them on his own is.
