First, a little story, from Marnus Labuschagne’s batting coach Neil D’Costa. Neil D’ Costa remembered the muffled respect in the voice of Marnus Labuschagne Labuschagne, who averages over 60 in Test cricket, when talking about Siraj. “He dangles it in and suddenly gets to hold its line. Have to be careful against this bloke.” There have been a few edges already at Nagpur thus far. “With wobbled seam, how much the ball will do neither I know nor the batter. Sometimes it goes straight after pitching other times it can come in sharply. Most of my wickets come through wobbled seam. It is effective for me and I trust it to work for me,” Siraj had said last month. 𝑰. 𝑪. 𝒀. 𝑴. 𝑰! 1⃣ wicket for @mdsirajofficial 👌 1⃣ wicket for @MdShami11 👍 Relive #TeamIndia's early strikes with the ball 🎥 🔽 #INDvAUS | @mastercardindia pic.twitter.com/K5kkNkqa7U — BCCI (@BCCI) February 9, 2023 “Inswing was my natural earlier but then it stopped so I also developed outswing. When I did not have the inswing, I developed the wobbled seam. It took a lot of time to get effective and give me confidence. The more I bowled in the nets, the better I got. In the IPL, I spoke to Dale Steyn as well for outswing which helped me a lot.” He was encouraged on the 2021 tour of England by the then bowling coach Bharat Arun. He would not only dangle ‘em in, but start playing havoc with this new fascination – the scrambled-seam ball. Up the slope at Lord’s, it would scramble across, and then cut away from the left-handers. Moeen Ali was the one doing the dangling this time, and as Ravichandran Ashwin would say on his YouTube channel, for some time only two players were in action: Siraj and Rishabh Pant, the wicketkeeper, as “fast off-breaks”, in Ashwin’s phrasing, kept cutting away from the left-hander. “How is he able to use the slope so effectively? Not even one ball pitched on the seam,” Ashwin would wonder. Arun had prepped him about the scrambled-seam ball to exploit the Lord’s slope and Siraj had run away with it like a kid. An equally-excited Sachin Tendulkar was moved enough to tweet a video explainer about it. Tendulkar first gave a demo of the back-spin Siraj imparts with his fingers running down the seam when he wants the ball to swing away. Then, Tendulkar showed how Siraj cuts his fingers at release for the in-cutter to yank the shape of the ball and send it tilting all scrambled towards the batsmen. The admiration in Tendulkar’s eyes tells a story of its own. L Balaji, former India bowler who is a bowling coach these days, had told this newspaper about how Siraj gets his front-on bowling style work for him. “The angle which comes in naturally (from the release point) towards off and middle, those guys I have seen have the greatest success. They make the batsmen play most of the time. Side-on right-handers have the angle that allows batsmen to leave the ball a lot more easily. It’s not too much movement in the air that works in South Africa but there is always help from the pitch for open-chested bowlers – because of their angle, they create an illusion of the ball coming in towards off and middle, and those who can get it to straighten from there do the maximum damage,” Balaji says. “With open-chested bowlers, even when they just about straighten the ball, batsmen seem to get opened up almost. A lot more than they would to a similar straightener from a side-on bowler. The angle of open-chested bowlers like Bumrah and Siraj makes the ball seem to be coming in and they are committed to play. Then that straightening, or even the ball that doesn’t come in that much, troubles them. They tend to test both the edges of the bat more.”
