Indian cricket currently has its fastest crop of bowlers in recent memory but they might also be the most wayward crop of bowlers in recent memory. The likes of Umesh Yadav, Varun Aaron and Mohammed Shami are brilliant one day, appalling the next or simply out injured.
It is a mystery that has bedevilled MS Dhoni and convinced him to rely on the cunning of line-and-length operators rather than the battering-ram of genuine pace.
For Brett Lee, the former Australia fast bowler, it all comes down to the proper training. Lee took 310 wicket from 76 Tests at an average of 30.81 and a strike-rate of 53.3, so he knows a thing or two about bowling quick and accurately.
File photo of Brett Lee. AP
“I have always said that there is no reason why you can’t bowl fast and you can’t bowl the perfect line,” he toldFirstpost in Mumbai last week. “It takes practice.”
The trick, according to Lee, is to train your body so you don’t have to bowl flat out all the time. “If you are going at 100 percent every time, you might be here, you might be there kind of thing. But if you go at 90 percent, you can bowl nice and straight and that’s probably the key.”
That sounds easy enough but it comes with a catch: “You have to train to get yourself up to bowl 150kph at 90 percent, which is hard to do.”
Lee was kind enough to provide a list of dos and don’ts that helped make him into one of the quickest bowlers in the world in his prime:
1) Stay out the gym room. No weights
2) Be a good runner.
3) Work on your flexibility.
4) Work on your lower core strength through sit-ups and push-ups.
5) Have the right momentum and balance at the crease.
Staying out the gym is something a number of former fast bowlers, including India’s own Kapil Dev, have said over and over again. It makes intuitive sense but goes against the conventional wisdom in the gym-obsessed times we happen to live in.
Lee has a career economy rate of 3.46. That is almost a full run lower than Umesh, who concedes 4.31 an over, while Aaron is more of a spendthrift, with an economy rate of 4.91. As a result, even though Umesh’s strike-rate is almost identical to Lee’s at 53.6 compared to 53.3, Umesh’s average is eight runs higher than Lee’s at 38.56 compared to 30.81.
This doesn’t mean Lee never went for runs. All bowlers can be expensive on any given day. “You have to accept it and move on and try to limit the amount of times that happens,” he said.
According to Lee, the one other crucial trait a fast bowler also has to have aside from pace is a 'very high pain threshold'.
“What a lot people are realising these days is that fast bowling is a very hard job. You night have a blister on the back of your foot. You might have a toe-nail that is coming off, that is black. You might have a niggle in your back. You might have a sore elbow, a sore shoulder or a sore calf. You’ve got to get through it.
“Throughout my whole life I have played and bowled with pain since 16, People think you are you 100 percent, but that is not the case. You have to find a way to fight through it.”
Lee was in India as the first global brand ambassador for Cochlear, an Australian company that makes devices that can “provide a sense of sound to a person who is profoundly deaf or severely hard-of-hearing.” He was promoting the “Sounds of Cricket” campaign that is aimed at spreading awareness about the impact of hearing loss and how implants can help mitigate them.
“Imagine watching a game of cricket, and watching your favourite cricketers like Sachin Tendulkar, and you can’t hear the crowd, you can’t hear the sound of ball on bat, you can’t hear the sound of people cheering or the players talking,” Lee said.
“I would like everyone to walk away and go — me as a parent or an uncle or an teenager — if I know someone who is suffering from hearing loss, or they think might be suffering, to encourage them to see a specialist. The quicker you get the implant in, if that is what you need, then obviously the better off you will be.”
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