India versus New Zealand: Mohammed Shami has mastered the art of bowling out batsmen, like Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis did | Cricket-world-cup News

There are eleven legitimate ways to get a batsman out. But the bowled is perhaps the queen of all dismissals. Even more so when a fast bowler batters the stumps. It’s the ultimate spectacle; the sign of a bowler’s absolute powers, the picture of a batsman’s utter defeat too. In the foothills of the Dhauladhar, Mohammed Shami treated the audience with the spontaneous thrill of blasting batsmen’s stumps.
Three of his five dismissals were bowled. The first one speared onto the stumps from Will Young’s inside edge. Such ‘bowled’ dismissals are of a relatively inferior quality — the half a centimetre of wood the ball brushes before hitting the stumps robs some punch out of the blow. But the second one produced sudden unfettered joy. Mitchell Santner was just a ball into his innings, but he is no imposter with the bat. He has a Test hundred, could clear the fence with orthodox strokes and could at least preserve his wicket, if not pick the seamers to the ropes.
But Shami not just devastated him, but defeated him. From around the stumps, wide from the crease, Shami galloped in. Santner could read Shami’s mind. He would hoop the ball inwards. He could get the bat in time to stab the ball from crash-landing on his stumps. He was hanging on his back-foot so that he gets adequate time to protect his stumps. But as Mike Tyson once said, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face. The ball kept swerving in at extreme pace. All the spectacled batsmen could spot was perhaps a round, white apparition screeching onto his toes. Perhaps, he would not have seen the ball at all. Santner froze. Just his hands went down, as though he were chopping the ball from danger. But even before the bat was halfway through its descent, he could hear the sound of leather knocking the wood. He did not turn his head back. The sight of the flattened pole would crush his heart.

The poor stick. It bore the brunt of Shami’s fury next ball too. Having just watched the previous ball, Matt Henry would have been fearful of the impending misfortune. Shami was in his mind even before he had gone out to face the ball. He stood coiled on the back-foot. Shami, cleverly. pulled his length back a trifle. Henry’s eyes twinkled. He unpacked an extravagant straight drive but with absolute disregard to the fundamentals. Swished the thin air, with an emphatic follow-through, only for Shami’s ball to spear inwards and thrash his leg-stump to the vicinity of the wicket-keeper KL Rahul.
Shami let out a scream of joy. But what perverse joy does a bowler get when nailing a lower order batsman? But no fast bowler would res the sheer joy of the stump flipping and somersaulting, no matter whether it is a No.11 or No. 1.

Henry, mind you, is not the average tail-end joe either. A bowled is akin to a thunderous ace in tennis. You are not just beaten, you are defenseless. For the primary purpose of any batsman is to guard his stumps. In that sense, every other dismissal originates from bowled, from the fear of getting bowled. There are more artful and subtler ways of getting a batsman out, but nothing stings a batsman as the bowled. They are action heroes compared to the method actors.

It’s the speciality that made Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis more watchable than Glenn McGrath and Courtney Walsh. So is the case with Shami. As many as 57 of his 176 wickets were collected this way. Nearly one in three scalp is a bowled. Every second victim of Akram was bowled, while Younis’s rate was 2.7. In comparison, Shami’s colleague Jasprit Bumrah gets a batsman bowled every 3.4th delivery though he has an arguably better yorker. Then, Bumrah these days is more than a yorker-spitting machine and has several other modes of deception.Most Read
1
India vs New Zealand Live Score, World Cup 2023: Virat Kohli’s brilliance take IND to a four wicket win

2
Leo box office collection Day 3: Thalapathy Vijay-starrer leaps past Rs 200 crore global gross in three days, is already the 7th-biggest Tamil film ever

See More

So has Shami — he has had them nicking to the slips, leg before the wicket, caught off bouncers — but the classical Shami wicket is a bowled. The ball hitting back of length or good length and taking off fiendishly into the right-hander’s pads. No better ball embodies his craft than the pearler to Shai Hope at the 2019 ODI World Cup. The ball swished straight, before it suddenly cut back sharply to destroy the stumps.

The diversion is quick, the curve of the upright-seamed thunderbolt is so beautiful that even batsmen could be hypnotized. This was how Shami blasted onto the scene too, in Eden Gardens. Six of his 11 wickets were bowled, and often beaten with prodigious seam movement. With Shami, as it was with Akram and Waqar, it is not just about beating batsmen with pace, though speed does play a role, but with swing, angle and movement off the seam too. Imagine the havoc Shami would have wreaked had he operated in the pre-two-new-ball era, like Waqar and Wasim, with his knack of harnessing reverse swing too.He took the stump-blasters so much for granted that the pursuit of making a batsman nick, a more aesthetic art, once obsessed and durbed him. “I couldn’t understand how to get the outside edge.
Everything was there: perfect seam, perfect line, but the edges were not coming. The only thing in my mind was to keep patience. Just laugh it away. Aayega, aayega, aayega, lekin woh aaya hi nahi [It will come, It will come, it will come, but it didn’t).” he once wrote in this paper. The edges did come, but the bowled was still the most beautiful aspect of watching Shami.