India’s Mohammed Shami reacts as he leaves the field after a five-wicket haul during the ICC Champions Trophy cricket match between India and Bangladesh at Dubai International Cricket Stadium in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, Thursday, Feb. 20, 2025. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
The eyes of television cameras searched for Mohammed Shami. When they located him, he wore a shy, warm smile. He soon broke from the crowd and ambled to the run-up point, the trajectory of the next ball playing in his mind, the off-cutter that marked his two hundredth ODI wicket now a mere time-stamp on his remarkable cricketing journey.
The moment suitably captured the essence of Shami the man— un-theatrical and un-obsessed with the statistical peaks, a superstar with an everyman’s persona, seam-scientist with a common man’s air. He wouldn’t have burned the midnight oil digging numbers or spent sleepless nights dreaming about his No 200, or evaluated his spot in the pantheon of India’s great fast bowlers. Such trivialities don’t fuss him. He is, at the heart, a pure romantic.
The bowling is an extension of it—the flowing action, dancing as though to the percussive beats from the stands, the pliant fingers and loose, tensionless fingers coaxing the straight-seamed ball into a curvy, gyroscopic, path, and the sudden violence the ball assumes upon landing. He is perhaps, at his core, a pure sadist. For how could a syncing of such devastating beauty produce something as devilish as a well-proportioned Shami fireball!
But Shami’s journey to becoming the fastest Indian bowler to the 200-wicket mark was about blending romanticism and sadism with sweat and pragmatism. His whole bio is about the struggles to forge a career out of cricket, taking the migrant trail from the back-woodsy Uttar Pradesh village of Sahaspur to the maidans of Kolkata, where he sometimes slept in the groundsman’s tent and the man-of-match award was often a meal, a packet of sweets or a kulhad of chai. But he persevered, and reinvented himself multiple times, waged battles with the mind and body, and emerged victorious to become one of India’s greatest bowlers in Tests and ODIs.
He was nearly the lost seamer in the white-ball format. After a stellar 2015 World Cup, he sustained a fractured knee that ruled him out for nearly a year. When he returned, the white-ball stocks had plummeted. In the four subsequent years, he featured in only five games. Test-match resurrection was easier—he was born to play it—but limited-over reintegration was tougher. “Those were really tough days. I tried a lot of different things, and failed several times. But I didn’t give up and kept working harder,” he told this daily at an Idea Exchange.
The hard yards that Shami put in to shape his career has often gone unsung and unnoticed, as opposed to perhaps a batsman trying to restore his run-flow. In his wilderness days, he built a small concrete pitch in his village, installed lights fastened to poles, paid local batters to face him, and bowled hours on end with the white ball drenched in water. He bowled with the old, new, semi-old and semi-new ones, so that he learned the characteristics of it during every stage. He reaped rewards, but he didn’t stop his quest for perfection, even if at times his body revolted.
When the World Cup at home arrived, he had sculpted himself as one of the deadliest white-ball bowlers in the world. He warmed the bench in the first four games, but when his hour arrived, he marvelled the world with spells of ravaging fury, with a greatly evolved and subtle craft. This decade, he has been something of a Glenn McGrath operating at a higher pace. He hits the same channel and pounds the exact hard-length spot with no discernible change in his angle. Yet, the balls behave differently, some seams more pronouncedly than the others, some straightens off the lines, some skids, some climbs to hit the bat’s splice.
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The secret lies in how he alters the angle of his wrist, indecipherable from 22 yards, to conjure different effects with the ball. And the pressure he exerts either with his middle finger or index finger on the ball. He modernised his tools bag with a cutter and slow-bouncer too. But importantly, he has ridden the habit of gifting a boundary an over. He wastes nothing and makes batsmen play at every ball, albeit uncomfortably.
The results are glowing. Since 2019, he has nabbed 102 wickets in 52 games, at an average of 21.53, striking once every 23 balls. All six of his five-wicket hauls—no compatriot has managed half as many— have arrived in the phase too. He quickly sizes up the nature of the pitch, the mindset of the batsman and the right length to bowl. He struck with his sixth ball, the ball moving a wee bit from around the stumps to graze the left-handed Soumya Sarkar. He didn’t burst into celebration or theatre. It’s the way he is; it was the way he was when he captured his two hundredth wicket and, later, his sixth five-wicket feat. He is not for the sensationalists, even if his career has been nothing short of sensational.
