Troubled times for Ishant Sharma:
His career so far has been unpredictable and underwhelming. Can he resurrect his second innings?
The strapping paceman from Delhi, who has underachieved after making a wonderful start to his Test career, was almost unplayable on a helpful surface, finishing with career-best figures of 6 for 51 to spearhead India's charge for a series-levelling win.
shant now has 30 wickets from five and a half Tests against New Zealand, including consecutive five-wicket hauls, which compares favourably to his career numbers of 164 wickets from 54 and a half Tests, with five five-fors.
With 15 wickets after three innings in this two-Test series, he is the leading wicket-taker by a distance, but whether that can be used as evidence to emphatically state that he has turned the corner is debatable.
There have been similar phases in his career when Ishant has threatened to turn the corner, only to slip back into expensive, expansive ways. That after 54 Tests and six and a half years at the highest level, he is still being viewed as someone with enormous potential that is yet to be fulfilled is a bit of an indictment of his skills.
If Ishant is still talked of in these terms and not as an explosive, devastating, occasionally match-turning bowler, it has largely to do with long troughs following the odd crest. Ishant seemed to have come of age on tour of the West Indies in the middle of 2011 when, in three Test matches, he took 22 wickets including two successive fivefors.
After that, however, he had to wait a further two and a half years and 33 innings before picking up another fivewicket haul, in the first innings in Auckland last week. When a New Zealand journalist sought to know if this was the best he thought he had bowled in a Test match, Ishant retorted, "Even in my last press conference (in Auckland), I said that I have been bowling well since the tour of South Africa. It's just that people are recognising it now because I am taking wickets."
Ishant hasn't been found wanting for effort, but his incisiveness has often been in question. He has a career strike-rate of 65.5 balls per wicket despite having played 24 of his 55 Test matches in Australia, New Zealand, England, South Africa and the West Indies. If anything, his natural length - short of good length — has been his greatest undoing because at his gradually reduced pace, the ball sits up nicely for the batsmen to either cut when he provides width outside off, or pull when the ball is just that little bit wide but not enough to play the cut.
Ironically enough, it was his natural length that turned out to be his biggest ally on Friday on a most responsive pitch where the ball nipped around considerably with the grassy surface at its freshest. Any reference to Ishant would be incomplete without mention of the spell he bowled to Ricky Ponting in the second innings at Perth in January 2008.
Name: Gauri Kesarwani.
PGDM: 2nd (sem)
Date: feb- 20,2014
Source: The Economic Times
No comments:
Post a Comment