India are creating history with bat and ball
10 balls from hell. Also, runs for Iyer, Gill and Kohli. Notes on Madushanka and Theekshana.
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Sri Lanka won the toss and decided to call it a day after that. Madhushanka still did his thing, but like it is hard to eat corn off the cob without any teeth, it is hard to get wickets when you drop catches. So India used this as a practice game to get runs into Gill and Iyer who hadn’t scored as many. And then ended up with a fancy 350-odd total. After that, there was no cricket, only violence. Bumrah took a wicket first ball. Siraj took a wicket first ball. Shami was on a hat trick. It was more wickets than runs - let us check the record books - kind of game.
10 balls from hell (JK)
There are some balls you cannot hit. And if you haven’t played cricket, they aren’t always obvious to you. But let me explain this. Jasprit Bumrah bowled a delivery that should be illegal. Look at the angle, this is almost as wide as a delivery from a left-arm bowler. The ball lands on the stumps. It should end up down the legside. Instead, it hits the pads in front of the middle.
There was one delay early on from Sri Lanka losing wickets, and that was because Mohammad Siraj had broken a bail. The only way for the Sri Lankans to stop the carnage was to let a ball hit their stumps and hope that it got damaged. That was the level of India’s early bowling.
We have seen at times in this tournament when a team loses lots of wickets, the bowling team is involved, but often there is poor batting. For 10 balls, Sri Lanka made one mistake that ended in a wicket, the rest was just that the bowling was too good. They were facing balls that were not meant for normal folk to handle.
Like the ball to Dimuth Karunaratne, which is full, but still straightens massively. The ball shouldn’t seam this much in such a short space. And ofcourse it does it at pace, and first ball. Usually to get this kind of jag off the wicket you have to hit a length, to do this when it was full is a bit unfair. Also, let us note the batter.
No matter what you think of Karunaratne the ODI player - surprise is probably one way to react - he’s been one of the world‘s best Test openers over a long period with the second most Test runs. So you’re not going through some pinch-hitting white ball cavalier here, but the real deal.
This actually looks like a poor shot from Sadeera Samarawickrama, and considering the match situation, it is not ideal. But there is even more going on here than it looks. One thing is what Siraj is doing on the crease was moving around. So if Samarawickrama saw this ball, he might have thought it was close to his body, but because of where he clever from, it was wider. This is their worst wicket, and it has genius behind it.
And he came wide again to Kusal Mendis, this ball landed exactly where a previous one had, but because of the angle, it was an entirely different ball. So instead of bowling a ball outside off on a length that moved away, he delivers a ball angeling in that straightens, much like the Bumrah one. He also sent the bail into space.
But I want to focus on a place at the wicket here. Siraj moves around a lot, two of these wickets from coming wide on the crease. But you can also see that two balls land on the same spot, but once comfortably misses the stumps by a load. The other one crashes into the off-stump. It’s all about the release. Both of these balls do similar things, but he turns them into different propositions by moving on the crease.
And you look at where he comes for the Karunaratne wicket. The variety of where he lands does make issues for the batter. His ability to do it and still land the ball on the same spot is the killer though.
Mohammed Siraj averages 5.31 bowling to Sri Lanka in the powerplay. 16 wickets from 168 balls. But I wondered actually where he comes up in history. Of the bowlers with 600 balls up top, no one has ever had a better average than Siraj. Now obviously McGrath is just behind him, with four times as many deliveries in my database.
But this is the thing, every time you look up something at the moment, there are current-day Indian players at the top. This is an aside, but at the moment, India has the two players with the highest batting averages of all time right now. Everywhere you look it is incredible.
Shami has actually gone further ahead on this list. He started as the player with the most wickets per match at the World Cup, and this game meant he now averages three victims in each game in the biggest tournament.
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