Bowlers are nerdier than you realise. Fast bowlers, in particular. The strongmen of any cricket team, they puff their chest out that bit more around their contemporaries, safe in the knowledge that whilst they can bowl a short ball at you, you cannot bowl a short ball at them.
India's Mohammed Shami bowls during a practice session ahead of the match against Australia in the ICC World Test Championship (WTC) final (BCCI Twitter)
The World Test Championship final, however, will be contested between two bowling units defined by their brains as much as their brawn. India, without Jasprit Bumrah, still boast of Mohammed Siraj and Mohammed Shami as two of the smartest bowlers in the modern game. Australia, without Josh Hazlewood, still count captain Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc as two of the leading quicks of the last decade. Two seam attacks that take as much pleasure beating you in a spelling bee as they do in an arm wrestle.
India, in 2021-22, and Australia, in 2019, left their previous tours of England with two-all draws. Both series, whilst drawn on paper, felt like victories for the visiting teams. Australia retained the Ashes with a match to go and were present physically, if not mentally, during their defeat in the fifth and final match at The Oval. Covid-19 interrupted India’s tour with them 2-1 up, only to return a year later and lose the final match of the series to a reimagined England team.
Both were moral, if not mathematical, victories, built on two sets of quicks with contrasting yet clearly defined styles. India targeted England’s stumps; Australia targeted their outside edge. 14.7% of India’s deliveries against England hit the stumps, compared to 9.3% of Australia’s. Two extreme sides of England’s coin, who, in home conditions, hit the stumps with 11% of their deliveries in both series.
India’s efforts to home in on the straight and narrow was a team effort. Siraj, Umesh Yadav, Ishant Sharma, Bumrah and Shardul Thakur hit the stumps more often than their Australian counterparts, with only Mitchell Starc, who played just one Test, sneaking in ahead of Shami and preventing every single one of India’s bowlers from bowling straighter than the Aussies.
Two clear processes produced two clear results. Of seam-bowling dismissals, 43.7% of India’s wickets came through bowled and LBW, compared to just 29.1% of Australia’s. Meanwhile, as Cummins and co homed in on the outside edge, they claimed 20 wickets caught in the slips to India’s 13.
Siraj and Pat Cummins sat at the greatest extremes of each team’s strategy, Siraj hitting the stumps with 17.3% of his deliveries, a figure almost double that of Cummins, who had the lowest hit percentage at 8.6%.
Whilst part of this difference in strategy was due to nurture, part of it was down to nature. Put simply, Australia are a taller bowling unit than India, and where India aimed to accentuate the skiddier nature of their shorter bowlers such as Shami and Siraj, Australia aimed to do the same through the steeper bounce their taller bowlers achieve. In 2019, more than 90% of Australia’s deliveries were delivered from a height of over two metres, compared to just 16.8% of India’s. A difference that meant while both teams delivered roughly the same percentage of straight balls (24.6% for India v 22.1% for Australia) and India’s average length was only 30cm fuller than Australia’s, India hit the stumps far more often.
It is a strategy from India that we may well see exaggerated further during the WTC final. Whilst The Oval may be a neutral ground for both teams, it isn’t unfamiliar to either, with India recording a famous victory there in 2021. That match saw their bowl straight strategy go to even further lengths, with the team hitting the stumps with 18.1% of their deliveries, and Siraj, Bumrah and Yadav averaging at least one ball an over that forced the batter to play. Siraj, king of the straight and narrow, hit the stumps with an incredible quarter of his deliveries. Australia hit the stumps with one in every ten.
Whilst India won at The Oval in 2021, Australia lost in 2019 when it was notable that the bowler who found the most success for them, Mitch Marsh, was also the one who bowled the most full and straight.
All in all, as the two best Test teams walk out on Wednesday to decide who will be world champions, the advice from their coaches and captains will be the same that is yelled from every boundary of every junior and club game across the world. Hit the stumps.
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