India went into their opening match of the T20 World Cup in 2021 with pedigree, reputation and form on their side. After all, in World Cups of the 50- and 20-over varieties, they had never lost to Pakistan previously. Furthermore, they had swatted aside the challenges of England and Australia in the pre-tournament warm-up games with consummate ease and seemed primed to get their campaign off to a winning start against their arch-rivals.
In the space of seven deliveries, a strapping left-arm quick answering to the name of Shaheen Shah Afridi brought them to their knees. With his fourth delivery, in the first over of the game, the ‘other’ Afridi trapped Rohit Sharma in front with a searing inswinger, one of the most difficult balls to negotiate when the bowler gets it right. Hardly had Rohit, dismissed for a first-ball duck, taken off his pads than his opening partner K.L. Rahul followed him to the dugout, bowled neck and crop by another in-ducker that hastened off the surface, hit him on the pad and rolled on to the stumps.
Suddenly, India were 6 for 2 in 2.1 overs, two of their top batsmen nursing wounded egos, and Pakistan were on a roll. Those twin strikes didn’t just knock the stuffing out of the Indian top order, they also seemed to drain the fight out of Virat Kohli’s men, who were pummelled by ten wickets and lost badly to New Zealand too in the next game to play themselves out of contention very early in the piece.
Afridi’s remarkable deeds did not end with those two scalps. He came back later to dismiss Virat Kohli for a stylish but ultimately futile 57 to finish with three for 31 and the Player of the Match honours. His searing opening burst was reminiscent of Wasim Akram at his pomp, when the Sultan of Swing made the ball ‘talk’ and moved it this way and that with just the subtlest change in wrist position and angle of the seam.
The left-arm over bowler who brings the new ball back into the right-hander is amongst the most difficult protagonists to neutralise in the sport. As it is, there aren’t too many left-arm quicks going around, and not everyone is adept at getting the ball to swing back in from over the wicket, a line which largely facilitates the ball going away from the batsman with the angle. Therefore, when someone possesses the ability to produce excellent, well-directed inswingers at not inconsiderable pace, they add a whole new dimension to their craft and make life dicey for openers, as Rohit and Rahul will testify.
Because batsmen encounter this particular variation only sparingly, their technique gets found out if the bat starts to come down from second slip or gully. What that means is that they often end up playing around the front pad, and when they try to compensate for the late swing by moving the front foot back a touch, they open up a gap between bat and front foot which is enough for a skilled performer to sneak the ball through to the stumps.
Currently, limited-overs cricket is fortunate that there is a plethora of quality left-arm quicks who can swing the ball back in appreciably. Afridi apart, there is the virtuoso from New Zealand, the experienced Trent Boult, who has made it a habit of striking with the new ball. Arshdeep Singh, the fast-rising young Indian, is primarily known for his variations at the death, but as he showed recently in Thiruvananthapuram against South Africa, he can be more than a handful up top if the conditions are to his liking.
Marco Jansen, the strapping South African, and Obed McCoy, the powerfully built West Indian, are equally felicitous in getting the in-swinger going, as is Reece Topley, the Englishman who recently took six wickets against India in an ODI but has unfortunately been ruled out of the World Cup with an injury. And, of course, who can forget Mitchell Starc, the seasoned Australian who can be as devastating as any in the world when he hits rhythm.
The cynosure, needless to say, will be Shaheen Afridi, who will get a chance to reprise his heroics of last year when Pakistan take on India at the sprawling Melbourne Cricket Ground on Sunday. Afridi hasn’t played a competitive game since July, recovering as he was from a knee injury that once threatened to rule him out of the competition. Hearteningly from a cricketing standpoint, he has made a complete and total recovery as well as his ambitions clear.
“I wanted to turn in a performance that people would always remember,” he said recently of his heroics in Dubai last year. More than the successes he had had previously, those two wickets of Rohit and Rahul thrust him inexorably into the limelight, a limelight the 22-year-old seems to be positively thriving in.
When he lines up in front of nearly 90,000 spectators at the MCG, Afridi will not be unaware that Rohit and Rahul will, if only briefly, think back to 12 months back and reflect on the fate that befell them. The psychological edge, for whatever it is worth, will be with the Pakistani, even if India have come a long way as a T20 batting force in the last year and will be desperate to prove that the events of Dubai were just an aberration, an exception to the norm and nothing more.
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