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Follow UsAt what point does a bowler stop being just ‘very good’ and attain a level of greatness that would eventually become his legacy?
People talk much about greatness and what constitutes and defines it in Cricket. Most of the chatter is coloured by recency bias or nostalgia. None of it offers you a clear picture of it. Numbers help, but they need the crutch of exemplification to justify them.
In the case of Mohammad Shami, one has both to make their claim about his greatness. However, calling a current bowler great feels almost like a betrayal to the greats you are habituated to name in fan wars on social media. McGrath, Lee, Bond, Akhtar, Wasim, Waqar – all these feel so big in your head that their presence asphyxiates the greatness compartment in your cricketing brain.
So what if I tell you that Shami is greater than Glenn McGrath in World Cups? Sounds incredulous, right? How can someone be better than McGrath? Don’t you all remember 2003 and the inevitability around him? Forget even that; don’t you remember Sachin’s dismissal in the finals and how meek he felt against the great Aussie pacer that day?
But it’s a fact that Shami takes fewer deliveries than McGrath to get a dismissal (15.3 balls/wicket compared to McGrath’s 27.5!) and gets them at a cheaper rate than him in World Cups (12.9 runs/wicket compared to 18.2). His bowling strike rate (balls/dismissal) is the best in the world in World Cups (minimum 20 wickets).
In fact, Shami has been so otherworldly in the premier ODI tournament that when anyone getting more than one wicket per game is considered a good bowler, he’s taking almost four wickets in every 10-over spell.
The reason behind this is simple — he keeps bowling on that length or back of a length (nearly 70% of his balls fall in this region), and in terms of the line of the ball, he keeps it stump to stump at all the time. As a matter of fact, whenever Shami bowls at the stumps, he strikes every 7.5 balls!!
Not many fast bowlers have this ability to strike the stumps and keep them in play so often. Moreover, that brilliant upright seam position of his gives the maximum chance for the ball to move in the air, and then when it pitches, it lands on the seam and hence moves even after that.
Remember his dismissal of Angelo Mathews? The ball swung late, and after pitching, it jagged in even more and broke the batter's stumps. If you don’t remember that, you must recall what happened to Ben Stokes. Shami ran in, swung the ball a bit, landed it on its seam, and from a potential seventh stump line and eight-metre length, the ball jagged back enough to hit the top of the middle stump.
That just doesn’t happen!
No matter how many exclamation marks one adds in one's reaction to that particular delivery, it can never fully convey the incredulity of that delivery. And it’s because balls from that length hardly ever hit the stumps. They bounce above it. It is the skiddy nature of Shami’s bowling, where he gets the ball just to kiss the pitch and move and not really bang it in, that allows the ball to remain below stump height on Indian pitches. This is exactly why he has such an incredible bowling record in Test matches in India.
In all, Shami has got 14 dismissals from a good and back of a good length. As you can see in the beehive, 11 dismissals out of 23 have been on that stump line. This is what strike bowling gods would have ordained their perfect specimen to be like.
Shami doesn’t have the speed of Starc, that nagging accuracy of Mcgrath, or the charisma of Brett Lee. But his striking ability described above has allowed him to take the least balls for dismissal in ODI World Cup history, above the likes of the all-time ODI greats mentioned above.
Forget being the best in India. This guy from Amroha in Uttar Pradesh, which 99.999999% of you can’t even point out on a map, is the best in the World in the history of the biggest tournament in this sport.
And if you think Shami’s godly numbers restrict their divinity to the occasion of World Cups, just stop thinking, okay? Because look at the table below.
Ever since Shami made his debut, among bowlers who have taken a minimum of 100 wickets, he has the best strike rate. Yes, better than Boult, Starc, or even the sensational Shaheen.
That is how good Shami has been. He is the leading wicket-taker in this World Cup despite digging dirt in the dugout in the first four games. He is the fastest to 50 wickets in ODI World Cups. He has the most amount of fifers in World Cups. He has taken most wickets in a bowler’s first over in World Cup 2023. He has the most fifers for an Indian pacer in ODIs. In fact, he is sitting on such a big pile of records that he has broken that it would take a lot more paragraphs to list them down.
Mohammed Shami has come a long way from suffering that dark period after the 2015 World Cup, where he was injured and faced a long-drawn family strife. He survived that, strengthened himself, and is now one of the leading pacers in the world. All because he keeps focusing on the stumps. He keeps running in just to hit them. And he hits them better than any other bowler.
India would hope that he continues hitting them for just one more game because even if Shami bowls at the level of his own World Cup records, that should be enough to one, uproot the Australians in Ahmedabad and two, create a legacy of Shami where the word ‘great’ would be used as a prefix with his name until the sun swallows the only earth we’ll ever have.
