A fast bowling feast for the weekend

Fear is a great motivator&destructive force as the fearsome WI pace quartet of yesteryear.

 

By Baiju Joseph

 

Fear is a great motivator and a destructive force as the fearsome Windies pace quartet of yesteryear, Andy Roberts, Michael Holding, Joel Garner and Colin Croft, so emphatically proved the world over. Their varying skills and ability to hurt the batsman both physically and mentally yielded them loads of wickets. This is one reason why a fast bowler garners more respect from the cricketing world than a spinner. But come to the subcontinent, and the story changes.

 

This World Cup has been a nightmare for the fast bowlers with almost every other match producing score in excess of 300. Indian pitches in particular have always been unforgiving for fast bowlers. As was evident from the two matches played in Bengaluru, a score in excess of 320 is very much surmountable for any team that holds its nerves.

 

Does that mean the pace bowlers have no role to play in this World Cup?

 

Brett Lee, Shaun Tait, Mithchell Johnson, Laisth Malinga, Dale Steyn, Mornie Morkel, Shoaib Akhtar and Kemar Roach are eight names that have proved it otherwise so far. So what makes them special? Here are some statistics:

 

Collectively, these eight pacemen have bowled 116 overs and have taken 34 wickets at an economy of 4.03. In other words they are the captains go-to men who, on their day, can make wickets tumble like a pack of cards, no matter what the given conditions.

 

There are two qualities that make them so lethal:

 

1. Each of these bowlers can bowl at 145-150 kmph consistently

 

2. They can bend their backs to produce steep bounce from even dead pitches.

 

Lee, Malinga and Akhtar can produce prodigious conventional and reverse swing at drop-dead accuracy, which only adds to the batsmen’s challenges.

 

Steyn, on the other hand, is a genuine all-weather fast bowler, a genuine threat and someone who can do anything with the ball on any surface. I am really looking forward to his exploits against Sachin Tendulkar, Virender Sehwag and Co. later in the tournament.

 

From this pack, however Tait, Roach and to an extent Morkel have been guilty of spraying the ball around, but their sheer pace can rattle any batsman. All it needs is a single ball in the right channel.

 

Johnson has a reputation of being the captain’s bad boy as in the past he has been guilty of leaking too many runs at crucial moments of the game. So far, he has not disappointed his captain, Ricky Ponting, as his figures of 18.3 overs 5 maidens, 8 for 52 would suggest. Add to it, an economy of 2.81 – staggering by any standards.

 

This proves that if you are a fast bowler and if you have qualities like aggression, accuracy and pace no surface can be barrier. It also provides the captain with an opportunity to stem the flow of runs.

 

This weekend, thus, would be the weekend for the Expressmen, and I am really looking forward to a mouth-watering contest between the bat and ball.

 

(Baiju Joseph is a Bangalore-based Junior Scientist at a Bio-Informatics firm who is deeply passionate about cricket and likes to bowl fast whenever he gets an opportunity to ply his cricketing skills)

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