Mohammed Siraj - a showman who writes his own script

Be it Lord’s Test of 2021 or the Asia Cup Final of 2023.

Be it Brisbane 2021 or Cape Town 2024. 

As far as classic aphorism goes, Mohammed Siraj can take you on a ride and leave you at the door of ecstasy. You don’t need any drug to be intoxicated to fully buy into the idea he propagates. 

During the first Test in Centurion, Siraj was rather wayward. Either there were too many leg-side strangulations or an unusual insistence on bowling bouncers to little effect. When Dean Elgar was feasting on the likes of Shardul Thakur and Prasidh Krishna, instead of being the one to put a lid on it, Siraj was delivering one freebie after another. 

It didn’t matter that his two wickets of the innings came via two beauties - a devious outswinger that caught an edge off Aiden Markram and another inswinger that breached David Bedingham’s defense. If those two deliveries were a trailer of what Siraj could do with a red cherry in his hand, the rest of the innings had barely seen anything like that.

But a fresh day, heck, a fresh year, made Siraj introspect a bit more and show what he brings to the table. In the most Siraj way possible, he drew Markram in for a ball that shaped away from the right-hander. The South African opener was struggling against balls coming in the fourth and fifth stump line for a while - and that became Siraj’s modus operandi. 

Even against Dean Elgar, Siraj was devious. The blow-out of the last match was long gone and all Siraj was focused on was getting the job alright today. It reflected in his entire spell against left-handers as he kept on attacking the pads with extra bounce on offer. Tony de Zorzi suffered the fate as the leg-side strangle left him with no option but to hand a catch to KL Rahul.

Even the right-handers had an even sorry story to tell. He kept bowling in the channel against the righties on a surface where the bounce was inconsistent. South African batters built a house in the corridor of uncertainty, leaving room for no suspense and more diametric equations. Guess what, Siraj was feasting on them like Iftar.

There is a reason India so rely on Mohammed Siraj across formats now a days. The fittest of the lot, Siraj brings a lot of gaiety to the bowling pack. Even though he has a propensity to get carried away, he knows how to handle things in crucial situations. Cape Town was one of them and boy, what a Test he is having!