The curious case of Ishant Sharma

Ricky Ponting must now be wondering, “How did I falter to him?”

The career of Ishant Sharma has gone through a complete turnaround in 5 years – from a breathtaking youngster to a completely ordinary bowler. Faulkner must have now nailed the final nail in the coffin for the calls of dropping Ishant, and rightly so.

Over the past 3 years, he has not improved a touch and the “youngster” excuse ran out long before he thought. With the absence of Zaheer, Ishant was looked upon to take over the spearhead tag. Sometimes, responsibility brings the best out of players and we’d hoped for the same.

But clearly, Ishant seems to hate it. He has become far too predictable with absolutely zero variations in length or in pace. Batsmen (or even bowlers) are comfortable facing him as he now possesses very little threat. If he bowls 5 overs, only 3-4 balls attack the stumps, and such bowling is never going to get you wickets.

He had a very good in-cutter once which has now completely vanished and his short-pitched stuff is just being rubbished by even very ordinary batsmen. He doesn’t move the ball off the seam and the new ball seems futile when he bowls.

Experts say that the main reason for such a dip in form is his wrist position and it can easily be improved. But being in international cricket for this long, training with the NCA, being with Wasim Akram in IPL and having so many other chances, he has not improved and in fact, has degraded a bit over the years.

India has traditionally had problems in the seam department and very rarely does it produce great fast bowling talents. Ishant was being looked upon as such a talent once. But now, the scenario has changed. He’s not even in the top 5 fast bowlers in the country, yet he manages to stay in the team as we all believe we can once again rediscover the “old” Ishant Sharma.

The only positive is that he has age on his side and there is always room for improvement especially in cricket. He’ll be lucky to be in the squad for the future tours this year and he really needs to up his game to be anywhere near contention. People were saying he had talent but not luck, but now, his talent is in question which he needs to shrug off and answer in style. Time will tell if he can, but as it stands, Ishant is not even a shadow of the bowler he used to be or rather we expected him to be.