Pacers in England: The need to soften and then kill

Pankaj Singh and Varun Aaron need to soften the English top order and then Bhuvneshwar Kumar can come in as first change

It is sometimes – actually, most of the time – hard to be an Indian cricket fan. And it’s not simply because you have to reconcile yourself to seeing your team lose more often than it wins, especially away from home. Take the current series in England. We have played with two spinners in Tests. Ravindra Jadeja and Ravichandran Ashwin have been deemed better than ball turners like Amit Mishra, Pragyan Ojha and Piyush Chawla when selecting the team for the tour. And yet when it mattered, the chosen two were shown up for their deficiencies by a part-timer in the rival team. Nobody reckons Moeen Ali is half as good as the top Indian trundlers, including Jadeja and Ashwin. But when it came to delivering, the Indian fan saw that it was Ali who won two matches for England.

If watching the fallow efforts of Jadeja and Ashwin was a pain for the fan, it was no better watching the fast bowlers. India’s best bowler of the moment, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, with his kindly brown eyes and the shiest of smiles, has managed to take a bagful of wickets with his fast deliveries. While they can occasionally be called “fast” deliveries, they hardly troubled the speed gun beyond 132 kmph. Indian batsmen, on the other hand, faced Stuart Broad and James Anderson constantly firing away at them at speeds of over 140 kmph.

Kumar opens the bowling for India, and surely if you were a batsman you would walk in to open the innings against the India with an unburdened mind. Of course, it is also true that India’s fast-bowling attack has traditionally never left the opposition trembling. They say it’s a pity Sunil Gavaskar played for India. Else, he would have easily scored 10 more centuries and 5,000 runs more against the Indian fast bowlers.

The pace bowler has two tasks for his team: take wickets and intimidate the batsmen. Fast bowlers thrive on the dual fear they cause in batsmen’s minds. Playing in his divided mind is not only the anxiety of having his stumps rattled by a clever, quick ball, but also the apprehension about bodily harm caused by a projectile hurled in their direction at a fearsome speed by a ruthless enemy. The batsman, therefore, comes to the pitch with the double burden of needing to protect his stumps from the bowler’s guile and his body from physical harm.

In England, if anything, the English batsmen have walked out of the dressing room with a song in their hearts, for half their task has been achieved even before they face the first ball. Playing Kumar, India’s best bowler, means only a simple task of negotiating his swing. There are no anxieties about superfast deliveries thudding into your body or cracking into your helmet grille.

India does have quicks who can bowl at intimidating speeds. Varun Aaron can send the ball towards the batsman at close to 150 kmph. So can Umesh Yadav. But he did not make it to England. Pankaj Singh did. But this Rajasthan fast bowler's speed makes a mockery of his strapping physique. In the squad in England is Ishwar Pandey, who has the height and strength to bowl balls that will make the batsmen remember their double duty to be wary of the ball’s trajectory as well as its potential for physical damage.

What India needs is for its quickest bowlers to open the bowling, soften up the batsmen and then let loose Bhuvneshwar Kumar and his guiles on them. Even without the help of the quicks, he will still get wickets because he has the talent. But he is more likely to dismiss batsmen if they are jittery after having faced a torrid four overs of frighteningly fast Duke balls.

So why are the likes of Aaron and Yadav given a short lease and the restrictive brief of providing immediate results or being dropped, when others like Jadeja and Ashwin are given the latitude to put their unpenetrative wares on show Test after Test?