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Journalism of Courage
At first glance, Hardik Pandya comes across as a brash-as-any-youngster of his time — the swaggering gait, ear studs, tattoos and all. His flashy (in) temperance with the willow only plays up this impression. But his bowling is an utter antithesis — he is very much a chip off the old block, conforming to the old-fashioned values of discipline and accuracy, bowling within his limitations, persistently pitching the ball on a specific zone and bereft of the fancy variations in a modern-day bowler’s repertoire. While it’s presumptuous yet to hype him up as a trusted bowler in the ODIs — based on the evidence of only seven ODIs at home — it’s safe to ascertain that his methods, so far, has been successful, both in terms of economy and wicket-taking ability. The beauty of his craft is in its simplicity, so much so that it’s easily dissectable. Allied by a brisk run-up and a smooth, repeatable action, he unerringly bowls short-of-length, as if auto-piloted, on a fourth-fifth stump length.
That he has yet to bowl a full-length delivery, let alone a full toss, in 51 overs fully attests to a not-so-easily detectable trait of Pandya, his unwavering discipline. It’s only against left-handed batsmen that he has landed the ball on middle stump or middle-and-legish, understandable as he bowls from over the stumps and slants it across them. He maintains this length irrespective of the nature of the strip. Like for instance, on his debut in Dharamshala, the surface was sweaty and assisting lateral movement. From the other end, Umesh Yadav was pitching the ball fuller and making the new ball swing both ways. But Pandya stuck to his strengths, which he would feel justified after a three-wicket burst, the best on debut for an Indian pacer.
His length, neither cuttable nor drivable, doesn’t so much as intimidate them as it intrigues them. It irritates them. They can’t drive him through the off-side. They can’t thread him square either, for he hardly gives them any room and his stock shapes a shade back into the right-hander. He just stifles them by cutting out most of the strokes down the ground. Consequently, they have tried to contrive shots. In Kolkata, Jos Buttler tried to drive him on the rise and miscued it to cover. On his debut, Corey Anderson fell much the same way. In Kolkata, Jonny Bairstow perished trying to manufacture a cut and ended up slicing it straight to backward point. In Pune, Buttler tried to force him over mid-off but only cued a catch to mid-off. In the same match, Eoin Morgan tried to guide him through third man but feathered an edge to the keeper.
Four of his five wickets in the England series were fetched when batsmen tried to conjure a cut or drive on the rise. New Zealand batsmen, meanwhile, tried to pull him out of attack, but mostly found themselves spooning easy catches to mid-on or mid-off. There was another instance of Martin Guptill being squared up when trying to pick him off the length. While he isn’t adept at varying his pace—neither has he a variety of cutters nor yorkers–he slips in the odd bouncer.
It would be interesting to see whether he adopts the rewarding methods in the T20s too, where, in the past, he has been prone to alter his lengths more often.
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