INDORE: In hindsight, it wasn't a surprise that Mohammed Shami's second Test wicket was uprooting the middle stump of the batter (Marlon Samuels at Eden Gardens in 2013). His third Test wicket (Denesh Ramdin) followed soon after by similar means, the West Indies wicket-keeper losing his off stump. His fourth too left the furniture in disarray, breaching the defences of Sheldon Cottrell.
It was the same story in the second innings. His first fifer saw him breaking through the defences of Daren Sammy, Shane Shillingford and Cottrell again. On debut, the Bengal pacer had figures of 9/118 (six bowled and one lbw).
This, in a microcosm, is what makes Shami a different beast in home conditions. His ability to consistently focus on the stumps — irrespective of the type of batter — by bringing in the low bounce and the reverse swing into play has already caused problems for Australia's batters in the first two Tests.
Four of the six wickets he has picked up have been bowled, beating batters with his nippy pace off the surface before going past the inside edge (the low bounce also challenges the batters' under edge). If you cast your mind back to the first morning of the opening Test in Nagpur, he beat David Warner in a similar fashion.
In fact, from the time he made his debut, he's been the best fast bowler in India (minimum = 5 Tests) in terms of average (20.63) and strike rate (40.6) and second-best for wickets (74). Out of that 74, 44 have come via bowled (27) or leg-before (17). He's again the clear leader among pacers for these two modes of dismissals in India since his debut.
While Shami is an important cog in India's wheel, he's also an all-format operator. With fitness concerns remaining over Jasprit Bumrah, if they do decide to give him a breather, they can call upon readymade replacement Umesh Yadav, who's almost a Shami clone. Like Shami, he also targets the stumps. Like him, he also gets the ball to reverse as well and gets some early inward movement with a new ball. The proof is in the pudding; Yadav leads all pacers for wickets in this time period with 80 (17 leg before and 19 bowled, both second highest after Shami).
Coming back to Shami, because he attacks the stumps with both the new and the old balls and isn't afraid to go full against the lower-order, the hosts have been able to profit in different phases of the game. Go back to South Africa in Visakhapatnam in 2019. Across two spells with a newish ball, Shami accounted for the trio of Temba Bavuma, Quinton de Kock and Faf du Plessis by bowling them. With an oldish ball, Dane Piedt's resistance finished as he inside-edged a full-length Shami delivery onto his stumps.
The 32-year-old's ability, also, in a way, is the story of the domination India's pacers have enjoyed when compared to their overseas compatriots in this long unbeaten run of theirs. While Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja have grabbed eyeballs with their performances up and down the country, the pacers have quietly kept plugging away, targetting the pads and, by extension, the stumps of the visiting batters.
It's no secret that India's pitches don't offer as much bounce as some of the venues overseas but knowing how to use it to their advantage is what counts. From the beginning of this 15-series winning run — the Australian series in 2013 till the end of the New Delhi Test — India's pacers have accounted for 74 of the 131 bowled dismissals. It's similarly skewed in terms of leg-before decisions (65 to 36).
Because these surfaces highlight their strong points and hide their weaknesses — they do the exact opposite for visiting seamers — they have, consequently, had the wood over all of them in this period.
Kagiso Rabada. Trent Boult. Pat Cummins. James Anderson... some of the best 21st-century pacers have bowled on these surfaces but have been left in their wake, not because of a lack of skill but because they have been brought up in different conditions to the ones on offer. In the first two matches, Australian pacers averaged 51 runs per wicket. India's pacers picked a wicket every 20.1. You extrapolate that to an innings and it's 510 v. 201. Take the South Africa series in 2019 and the difference makes you want to question everything you know about pace bowling. India's bowlers averaged 17.5 while Rabada, Nortje, Philander & Co went at 70.2 (702 v. 175).
Sometime in the next two days, Starc, another pacer who has a below-par record in India (seven wickets at 50.14 at a strike rate of 86.1), will look to take a leaf out of Shami's handbook. Will he succeed?
If recent history is anything to go by, nope.