Kolkata: Earlier this year, Akash Deep was in Pune with his seriously ailing brother-in-law, helping him to get back on his feet. And every time he was in Lucknow during IPL, Akash spent sleepless nights keeping vigil at a Lucknow hospital where his elder sister, who the world now knows, was admitted for cancer treatment.
India's Akash Deep celebrates his ten-wicket haul in the game after their win against England on day five of the second cricket test match at Edgbaston in Birmingham. (AP)
It’s as if despair is hell bent on shadowing a man, who had lost his father and brother in the space of six months. Saurasish Lahiri, the former Bengal skipper, recalls Akash once asking him, in a moment of helplessness, if there would ever be a silver lining. “I just told him: ‘God burdens those who can shoulder this kind of responsibility’,” Lahiri says.
Akash soldiered on. This is a man who until he was 20 didn’t bowl with a leather ball full-time, and whose first season of structured cricket at a second-division club began without pay. To overcome those odds, make first-class debut happen at 23, Test debut at 27 and a first 10-wicket haul in just over a year takes the kind of grit few possess.
One wouldn’t know that seeing Akash though, as he quietly goes about his job. “Akash is like a sponge. He will observe everything, take mental notes and do his job silently. He isn’t someone to be swayed by one good performance,” says Lahiri, a former Bengal off-spinner who gave Akash his first trials as an U-23 bowler in 2017-18.
Akash’s story till then wasn’t one that Bengal cricket was unfamiliar with. Scores of young players turn up in Kolkata every year from Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, many of them used to playing tennis ball cricket in the Durgapur-Asansol coal belt like Akash.
But Akash has pace. Intimidating pace, Lahiri says. It first caught the eye of Joydeep Mukherjee — then Bengal Ranji team director — at the Rangers Ground here. Watching a second division Cricket Association of Bengal (CAB) league game, Mukherjee noticed the wicketkeeper standing 35 yards behind the stumps instead of the usual 10 because of a wiry fast bowler. Mukherjee called Lahiri, who summoned Akash for trials at the CAB indoor nets.
“He had no idea what indoors was, how a hard surface is different from a natural surface,” recalls Lahiri. “He was just keen on bowling quick. He was actually rattling batters. I had to stop him.” Akash’s selection wasn’t easy though. A back niggle prevented Akash from bowling in matches, which made Lahiri’s task of keeping him in the mix difficult with pre-season approaching and selectors wanting to see Akash bowl. But Lahiri, confident of Akash’s talent, appealed to Sourav Ganguly and Avishek Dalmiya. Akash got to stay at a dormitory and went in for a monthlong rehabilitation.
Work began on slowly making Akash game ready, with former Bengal pacer Ranadeb Bose working on basics like grip and release. Lahiri tried to delay his debut as long as possible until Akash was given a game against Mumbai and scored a quickfire 58 and took a five-wicket haul.
His journey kickstarted with that match. Bengal were on the lookout for a pacer by then as Mohammed Shami was constantly on India duty. Akash fit the bill with an uncanny resemblance to Shami in his ability to extract movement from even dead pitches. Ordered by England, the Edgbaston pitch in Birmingham for the second Test too was one such strip. Until Akash turned up with the ball that got Harry Brook, on 158, in the first innings.
On a length and seaming back as Brook tried to play it coming forward, the ball sneaked through the defence and took the top of off-stump. The second innings, similar ball, slightly lower but equally express, hit Brook on the back leg just above the pad, to be given out leg-before. Brook was bamboozled and left hobbled by the painful blow. “You can’t do anything about that,” skipper Ben Stokes later said about the dismissal.
Both times the ball moved in exaggeratedly, which is what you expect of Akash. The magic ball though was the one that got Joe Root, pitched in from wide of the crease, it straightened and clattered into off-stump.
Akash always had a great incoming delivery. But mastering this variation took some time, and some nudging. During Akash’s Test debut at Ranchi last year, former Bengal captain Manoj Tiwary recalls pointing out that he risked becoming predictable with the in-swinging delivery. “Which is why I asked him to work on the outswing. Even if it’s not an outswing, the ball holding its line is variation enough for a batter expecting the ball to come into him. When he started getting that right, he could plan the batters out.”
That is exactly what Lahiri claims Akash is capable of now. Cue the final hour of Day 4, a phase England were heavily dependent on Root to see out, only for Akash to nip those hopes, eventually finishing with 10/187 for the Test.
“He was so wide of the crease to Root that time that he had no other choice but to play it to the onside. To get the ball to leave him and take the off stump, that’s nothing short of magic,” says Lahiri.
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