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Business News/ Mint-lounge / Features/  The fast bowler conundrum
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The fast bowler conundrum

Aakar Patel on why we still don't have effective fast bowlers

Umesh Yadav bowling at a World Cup warm-up match in Adelaide. Photo: Theo Karanikos/AFPPremium
Umesh Yadav bowling at a World Cup warm-up match in Adelaide. Photo: Theo Karanikos/AFP

India will not win this World Cup, says former Australian batsman Matthew Hayden. He told the Mumbai Mirror last week that our batsmen would consistently need to do more work than those in other teams. This was “because every other team has a pace battery working for them" but alas, “India’s new ball options are very ordinary".

We won the world cup twice before without quality fast bowlers, and we also won a tournament in Australia 30 years ago without dropping a match so I don’t know how Hayden is so sure we will lose this time.

However the lack of pace is not a new problem and we have no good truly quick bowlers, and have never had them. But why? Old question.

“It’s not a natural thing," Zaheer Khan told The Times Of India in 2011, because “Indian bodies are not designed to bowl fast". Discussing aspects of why Indians did not make it at the highest levels of tennis, Vijay Amritraj once said that Indian bodies matured more slowly. He meant that given the high amounts of training required for professional athletes at a young age, Indians broke down earlier when pushed at a younger age, when they hadn’t matured.

Neil D’Costa, who coached Vidarbha’s cricket academy, said India’s quickest bowler Umesh Yadav had been hampered by injuries and also the slow acquisition of fast-bowling know-how. “He needed to learn that to be a good bowler it’s not just about running in and bowling five fast overs," D’Costa was reported as telling The Sydney Morning Herald.

If the Indians-mature-later theory is solely responsible for our slowness, why does it not apply to Pakistan?

I was discussing this some time ago with my friend Anjum Altaf, who runs a fine blog called The South Asian Idea, and what follows is what I said my understanding of the thing was. Particularly the question was—how was Pakistan, with the same gene pool, able to produce fast bowlers with such ease while we couldn’t?

The late M.A.K. Pataudi took the view that physical size was what made the difference. He observed that Indians were small generally but the larger specimens of South Asians were to be found in the north, particularly the Punjab/Haryana area.‎

Two-thirds of that area is today Pakistan, so they have a larger group of the right size. This is assuming that size is the most important aspect of pace.

There are of course not-so-tall quick bowlers (Malcolm Marshall), but they are exceptional. Amritraj often says that tall tennis players (he is a strong proponent of the idea that tennis players need to be 6ft, 4 inches or so to be able to dominate) have a large advantage.

Therefore, assuming Pataudi was right, the pool of availability is larger in Pakistan. Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis are both Jats. To this I may add that physically talented Punjabis in India are diverted in large numbers to hockey. This may also be true of Pakistan, but the pool is smaller here.

The second thing is that there is a 40-year tradition of fast bowling in Pakistan, and that nurtures the talent even if it doesn’t spawn it. This makes sense if we look at fast bowling as a specific skill, and one that has been learnt and taught in Pakistan since Imran Khan and Sarfraz Nawaz broke out in the 1970s.

Imran Khan wrote that he learnt more about fast bowling in brief exchanges with British cricketer John Snow than from any of his Pakistani coaches. Snow had gone through many of the same problems as Khan and his tips had become gold. So just as with squash players Jahangir Khan and Jansher Khan, and perhaps billiards players Michael Ferreira and Geet Sethi, there is a tradition that produces the next generation, which is missing here.

Third, in my opinion the Pakistani system of promoting and selecting talent is more egalitarian. One observation that indicates this: Indian players tend to speak better English on the podium than Pakistanis, because they usually are from urban, middle-class families.

What I am saying is that there probably was caste bias in selection. It exists in every other field in India so it is difficult to see why it shouldn’t apply to cricket selectors. And this bias was accompanied by the difficulty lower castes, particularly the peasant castes whose members tend to be large (Patel, Patil, Yadav, Jat, Gowda, etc.), had in getting into sports full-time. ‎Either because they were not for the most part urban or did not have access to the right schools and facilities.

Many have been struck by how there used to be a preponderance of urban Brahmin players in the Indian team. This happened at the cost of the peasant, who tends to be larger in size, for example, Munaf Patel.

There are exceptions, and Javagal Srinath and Ishant Sharma are large, Brahmin fast bowlers, but the norm in our cricketing history has been someone like Chetan Sharma, who doesn’t have the physique for quick bowling. A comparison with the peasant Kapil Dev shows what I mean.

I think the selection process has become less closed over time, particularly after the Indian Premier League, and we can expect to see more Indians who speak poorly at the podium but bowl faster on the pitch.

Read Aakar Patel’s previous Lounge columns here.

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Published: 20 Feb 2015, 03:33 PM IST
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