Indian Pace Bowling Attacks:An in depth analysis
Pace Bowling in India in the 1960's and 70's: Just a Formality
The Indian cricket team has always been a team with great batsmen and world class spin bowlers. The fast bowlers have never been India's strength. In the 60's and 70's the quality of pacers was very poor. Their job was just to contain runs till the ball lost its shine.
The arrival of Kapil Dev: India's First Genuine Pace Bowler
With the arrival of Kapil Dev in the late 70's, the Indians realised, what impact, a great fast bowler can have in a match. From then on, the quality of the Indian pace attack has slowly but steadily improved.
With the likes of Madan Lal, Chetan Sharma and Roger Binny also coming up, the Indian pace bowling attack was not as bad as before. However other than Kapil Dev, no one else was a match winner. As a result, the pace bowling unit as a whole was not at all world class. It was mediocre at best.
Indian Pace Bowlers of the 1990's:
In the 90's with the arrival of pacers like Javagal Srinath, Venkatesh Prasad, Ajit Agarkar and Debashish Mohanty, the Indian pace bowling unit improved as a whole. However, they still lacked the genuine pace to trouble the good teams.
Their other problem was the lack of consistency. As a result, they could not be match winners in test matches outside the subcontinent, even though the pitches were conducive for fast bowling.
21st Century: The Beginning of a new era for fast Bowlers in India
Under Sourav Ganguly's captaincy, in the early years of the 21st century, for the first time, fast bowling was taken seriously. A blueprint was prepared for producing good pacers. A system was also built for carefully handling the pacers and making sure that their careers were not cut short because of injury.
The team management understood that without having a good pace attack winning test matches abroad will not be possible. As a result of this change in outlook, India started producing good pacers like Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra, R.P.Singh, Irfan Pathan & Ishant Sharma.
Although none of them was the best in the world, they had the variety of pace and swing to trouble the best teams in the world and win India matches even outside the subcontinent. However, the same old problem existed,i.e. the lack of consistency.
After that, in the Mahendra Singh Dhoni era i.e.2007-2014, the nature of Indian pace attack remained more or less similar. They were good but not the best. On their day they won India matches, but those days were not frequent enough.
Present Pace Bowling Unit of India: A force to reckon with
In the last 3-4 years, with the arrival of the likes of Bhubaneshwar Kumar, Md Shami, Jasprit Bhumrah and Umesh Jadav, the Indian pace bowling attack has started to look more threatening than ever before. The bouncers of Umesh Jadav and Jasprit Bhumrah have been hitting the helmet of the opposition batsmen consistently.
The Indian pacers now seem to have the confidence of bouncing out the opposition batsmen, which is something new for Indian cricket. The foreign teams like England, Australia and South Africa are avoiding preparation of green tops against India because Bhubaneshwar Kumar's prodigious swing makes him almost unplayable in such surfaces.
Md Shami's subtle swing with nippy pace is proving to be enough to get the nicks to the keeper and slips consistently. Even in Indian wickets, which is flat for pacers, this present lot, has successfully used reverse swing in the middle overs, to take important wickets to win India matches.
Thus by putting up consistent performances as a unit, the present fast bowling lot of India has given the belief that they are capable of winning India matches in all formats of the game and in all conditions.
There is still scope of improvement as a unit, and also at a personal level, for each of these present pace bowlers. But their consistent match-winning performances over the last few years have already made them one of the best ever pace bowling units of India.