Like fast bowling on vinyl — Thanks for the memories, Mohammed Shami

Mohammed Shami could make an over feel like an interrogation, one in which the batter was never entirely comfortable and the bowler was always asking another question.  | Photo Credit: DEEPAK KR

Watching Mohammed Shami bowl in Test cricket was like reading poetry or listening to long-playing records on vinyl: an increasingly rare pleasure, an expression of a cricketing sensibility that valued aesthetic appreciation over the game’s obsession with instant gratification.

It is October 20, 2019. Day Two of the third Test between India and South Africa at the JSCA International Stadium Complex in Ranchi. India has just declared at 497 for nine. The stadium is packed, the light is beginning to fade, and dark clouds are gathering over the horizon.

Virat Kohli is orchestrating the field. Shami is steaming in. A back-of-a-length delivery climbs sharply outside off. Dean Elgar is caught in two minds, uncertain whether to play or leave. He does not quite get his gloves out of the way. The ball brushes them and settles into Wriddhiman Saha’s hands. Elgar is gone for a duck.

It is a fleeting moment but wonderfully absorbing, nevertheless. There have been plenty more memorable spells from Shami since, and more consequential ones, too. But that passage of play had such visceral thrill that it was impossible to sit still: the floodlights taking effect, dark clouds gathering, the crowd chanting Kohli’s name as he egged his fast bowler on. It was a snapshot of modern Indian fast bowling at its apogee, when Shami, Jasprit Bumrah, Ishant Sharma and Umesh Yadav, at home and away, kept India on the front foot.

Television replays, embellished with their close-ups and forensic analysis, don’t do complete justice to the sheer physicality of top-level cricket, a sense of the speeds at which the ball is moving and the players are reacting. Shami could make an over feel like an interrogation, one in which the batter was never entirely comfortable and the bowler was always asking another question. Every delivery did not produce a wicket, but the pleasure lay in watching him set one up.

Shami, along with Jasprit Bumrah and Umesh Yadav, kept India on the front foot with the ball in what was the team’s fast-bowling apogee. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Photo Library

The rhythms of Test cricket today offer something that is increasingly difficult to find elsewhere. Time to watch, time to wait, time to appreciate the small adjustments and repeated attempts that precede a moment of brilliance. The format can be indifferent to the demand for an immediate return or a defining moment. It asks you to stay, even when nothing appears to be happening.

Shami’s departure from the format makes that particular pleasure a little harder to come by. Not because fast bowling is running out of artists, or because the game has stopped producing them. Cricketers, like the game itself, are constantly evolving. Every generation finds new ways to interpret old skills, and what we sometimes mistake for the disappearance of a particular kind of player is often simply the emergence of another.

But that does not make the old pleasures any less worth preserving. Watching Shami run in, walk back to his mark and prepare to do it all over again was its own kind of pleasure. One that, like listening to a favourite record, will now have to be recovered from memory.