Fast bowling is a precise art, and a surfeit of it can blunt the skill and its efficacy. Fast bowling is also a taxing vocation, and overindulgence can break the human will and body.
But then Mohammed Siraj still bounds in, bowling his 1113th delivery on his 25th day of cricket on a tour lasting a month and a half, and conjures his fifth fastest ball of the entire series, clocked at 143 kmph. It is a full toss, only his second of a match in which he has sent down 279 deliveries, and it flattens the off-stump to give India the narrowest win in its existence as a Test-playing nation.
At a time when the exigencies of multiple formats have made managing workloads a priority for pace bowlers, the ever-present Siraj hasn’t been earmarked for that luxury. Since his debut in December 2020, no Indian has featured in as many Tests as Siraj’s 41. In the recently concluded drawn Test series, no bowler surpassed his gruelling tally of 185.3 overs, and the only other bowler who sent more than 1,000 deliveries—Chris Woakes—wasn’t half as effective.
His 30.1 overs were the fifth-most by an Indian pacer in the fourth innings of a Test, and Siraj is the only one to have bowled as many since 2013.
And yet, there was no let-up in intensity from Siraj until all the drama had been squeezed out of the series, all the gods invoked, and all the fingernails chewed. Siraj whips up an easy hostility at the snap of a finger and plays the pantomime villain from time to time, but there is no element of a supernatural aura, one that hovers around his Jassi bhai [Jasprit Bumrah]—that of India’s transcendental figure in India’s bowling attack.
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He is the salt of the earth, a ‘really nice lad’ despite the odd argy-bargy, and in the age of Instagram reels, simply needs a Google search-inspired wallpaper to make him ‘believe’. He is a captain’s dream who provides maximum output with minimum input, a commodity that often accompanies the ‘workhorse’ tag that puts quantity over quality.
But Siraj is far from just filling in the overs, holding one end up and buying recovery time for the rest of the attack. He elevates the contest and his skill in the absence of Bumrah to emerge as the face of India’s charge. During the Anderson-Tendulkar Trophy series, he picked 16 wickets at 19.81 apiece in the two games Bumrah couldn’t play, a significant level up from his seven wickets at an average of 61.28 when the maverick was present.
“When Jassi bhai isn’t around, then you get that confidence that you need to shoulder extra responsibility and I enjoy that. I don’t take extra pressure and try to keep things simple,” Siraj had said after nabbing four wickets in the first innings at The Oval against England.
If Siraj lacks artistry, he makes up for it with tenacity and superhuman endurance. His relentless eight-over spell on the second day at The Oval bears testimony. Making amends for a four-over first spell that went for 32 runs, Siraj pinned Ollie Pope and Joe Root in front with his go-to nip-backer from a good length before trapping Jacob Bethell in front with an in-swinging yorker—the only one he bowled in that spell, which he relished as his favourite scalp.
For the glut of overs he has bowled, Siraj’s planning and execution is astonishingly accurate. His third yorker of the match saw the ball scuttle through Zak Crawley’s defence off the final delivery of the third day and tipped the scales in India’s favour.
With ball paying homage to bat for the last part of the penultimate day, Siraj once again broke England’s resistance by darting the ball into Pope’s pads again a good length at the stroke of lunch and then unleashing hell across a 12.1-over spell spread over two days.
Siraj stepped up in Bumrah’s absence, picking 16 wickets at 19.81 in the two Tests that the latter missed.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images
Siraj stepped up in Bumrah’s absence, picking 16 wickets at 19.81 in the two Tests that the latter missed.
| Photo Credit:
Getty Images
A misstep of an inch at the fine-leg boundary, which resulted in Siraj handing centurion Harry Brook a six instead of dismissing him on 19, had threatened to sour an otherwise phenomenal series. But ubiquity is a double-edged sword; as much as it allows room for more error, it also affords chances to make amends. Siraj acknowledged that.
He induced so many false shots, 18 off the 25 deliveries, on the final day, that Indian fans wished for a provision that would allow him to steam in from both ends. Jamie Smith and Jamie Overton fell to his unerring ability to generate movement from a good length before he dug deep into his reserves of fortitude to produce that series-levelling nuclear-tipped yorker to castle Atkinson.
If elite athletes swear by the adage ‘mind over body’, it is a curious case of ‘body over mind’ for Siraj. His bowling has an instinctive feel, his ability to metronomically hit the good length as though the routine is steeped in his muscle memory. As many as 16 of his 23 scalps and 251 of the 283 false shots he has induced in this series were the result of homing in around that good length or just short of it.
Siraj seldom strayed full, delivering the second-lowest percentage (11.95) of full-length balls in the series, and second only to Bumrah (11 per cent), who played two matches less and almost 400 balls fewer. Moreover, the eight yorkers he dished out in the whole series yielded four wickets.
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In the face of a heavy bowling load, Siraj’s skills and clarity of thought have remained sharp. He is as much a battering ram as he is a precision strike weapon in India’s arsenal, capable of delivering a scene-shifting payload when the pressure mounts.
He plies his trade across formats. In the last four years, Siraj has played 43 One-Day Internationals, while no other full-time Indian pacer has even touched 30 matches in the corresponding period. He was a vital cog of Royal Challengers Bengaluru’s pace attack from 2021-24, spearheads the battery at Gujarat Titans now and is increasingly in the frame in India’s T20I plans.
Still, the workload management strictures almost always skip Siraj, as though he is rendered invisible by his omnipresence. There are no calls to ‘wrap him in cotton wool’. One must jog the memory to remember when he could afford to rest. With Bumrah’s fitness a constant worry, he is still, at best, a stop-gap spearhead.
But all of that could, and should, change after the jamboree at The Oval on Monday. If his heroics against Australia at The Gabba in 2021 were the face of an emerging Indian pace powerhouse, Oval 2025 was emblematic of that talent announcing itself as a leader unto himself.
