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It’s great to have strength in depth, but surely you want some idea who your best bowlers are. India have had five quick bowlers performing well on this tour alone. The picture’s murkier than our imaginary, more colourful past.
Zaheer Khan, RP Singh and Irfan Pathan provided some sort of freakish left-arm swing roadshow early in the tour. Now it’s the right-handers’ turn.
Ishant Sharma and Sreesanth dispatched an Australian one-day line-up starting Gilchrist, Hayden, Ponting, Clarke, Symonds, Hussey for just 159. By all accounts it was the kind of pitch that brings the bowlers sandwiches and makes their beds it’s so generous, but you’ve still got to do ‘the business’ and Sharma suited-up and shook hands.
So where are we? India’s young fast bowlers are still falling over each other trying to prove that they’re the best of the bunch, while simultaneously failing to appear in more than three successive matches without getting injured. It’s chaos. It’s delicious, overwhelming, unregulated chaos out of which something wonderful keeps appearing.
That’s how we remember India as a place. It’s strangely apt.
Your comments about Ishant Sharma in the original fast-bowler post were very prescient.
Eery..
I believe the King indulges in black magic…
Burn him!
We can regurgitate other people’s opinions with the best of them.
I have noticed that KC has a habit of predcting the future. He did so with Prior and Broad for instance.
Suave’s right. It can only mean that he’s a witch.
A warlock, surely.
Or neither.
Either way, it’s the ducking chair!
I like Ishant Sharma. I like that when he takes a wicket he sort of does a few skippy steps.
I wonder whether he has been told “don’t run away or anything, we can’t keep up, look at Sourav struggling. Try to keep it compact”.
by chair, I mean stool. Ducking stool.
What a great tour this has been. A rare opportunity for English cricket fans to take pleasure from Ricky Ponting’s misery.
“Strength in Depth” is a euphemism for “waste of talent”. It’s been part of recent history for Indian debutants to start off very well (remember L. Balaji, Ashish Nehra, and even Agarkar), to be overbowled, get injured, aggravate the injury by not receiving proper treatment, return with a several yards less pace, break down again, then be discarded permanently, Very few make it back, with Irfan Pathan being the notable exception.
The number of overs Ishant is bowling worries me, especially since he is 19. It may be obvious immediately, but eventually small injuries in the shoulder and back can aggravate to the point where he may permanently be damaged.
Burn him? Nah, first we’ve got to see if he floats. And then make sure he’s not a duck.