The former bowling coach of India Bharat Arun was startled to hear Mohammad Siraj’s voice in a phone call. “He sounded a touch sad, down, then,” Arun tells this newspaper on a day where Siraj thanked Arun for a turnaround in his fortunes in Australia.
At the end of the game against Prime Ministers XI at Canberra, Siraj talked about how he has “rediscovered the joy of bowling,” and how in the recent past he was “trying too hard to get wickets” and when it didn’t come, it led to a vicious loop. Everyone mattered, he said, told him to not to over-stress about wickets and just bowl. Be it Jasprit Bumrah, who told him “don’t worry about wickets, it will come in due time. If it doesn’t, come to me.” Or Morne Morkel, the current bowling coach, who told him, “You are a warrior, don’t worry, just bowl,” Siraj recalled at the end of the PM XI game.
But it was Arun’s advice that would give him the confidence to forget about wickets and enjoy the process. Arun recalls the conversation at the end of the home Test series against New Zealand. Siraj had been dropped from the second Test against New Zealand.
“He told me that the ball was sliding towards leg, he wasn’t getting the swing and the seam position didn’t feel as ideal as before,” Arun shares. “I had been watching him and had noticed a few changes and asked him what he had been trying. In his pursuit of wickets, he had felt that he had to increase his pace, try to get more swing/movement and was putting more effort at release.”
But all that had messed up with his original method. “The main problem as I saw it was his wrist wasn’t behind the ball, his most crucial weapon. In his effort to increase the pace, all these mistakes were creeping up. Perhaps he felt a bit rushed at the crease. What happens then is your body can also slide/tilt a bit more, especially if you are an open-chested bowler like him. That meant his radar was now going down,” he explains.
“Without the wrist at the right place, the seam position too was getting affected. And instead of getting more movement that he wanted, the bowling was getting affected,” he adds.
Simple plan
Bharat, who has mentored Siraj through his first-class years, knows what will work for him. “It’s no use saying get the wrist behind the ball; when you are edgy and worried, all that doesn’t make sense. I know Siraj, he works best when you give him a simple bowling plan, a drill, say.”
So, Arun told him in a subsequent conversation to aim at one stump, and keep bowling. “That’s the off stump, so to speak, and if he wants he can bring the ball from just outside or straight. Setting a simple target like that forces accuracy,” he details.
“I then told him to bowl a lot of yorkers at that one stump. Now, this is not to improve his yorkers but to get the wrist in the right position behind the ball. You can’t bowl yorkers, good ones that is, without the wrist in the right position. If it’s tilted or out of shape, then the ball won’t go where you want it to go.”
In the subsequent conversations, Arun says it was a happier Siraj who called him to say that the yorker plan had worked. “When the wrist is behind, the pace also increases automatically. The accuracy is a lot better, and you can actually then bowl what you want to bowl: be it the one that cuts back in or straightens,” he says.
“I talked to Bharat Arun sir. He said this is what is happening with me. He had known me for a long time,” Siraj would say at the end of the PM XI. “ I have been bowling very well for the last six-seven months but I wasn’t getting wickets. As a human being, you start wondering why you’re not getting wickets. So just trying a little too hard to get the wickets led me to miss my lines and lengths a little. So I sat at home and thought about why this is happening to me.” That’s when the thought hit him that he should call his old coach Arun.
The proof that the plan worked out would come in Perth, Arun knew. So he watched the game intently. “That Smith wicket in the second innings was the ideal Siraj for me. How much did it move? Not much. It’s not what he was trying to do when he was down and in poor form; he had wanted lots of movement etc. That’s not him, as in that’s not his bowling style,” he says.
Subsequently, his shoulder didn’t fall away prior to release. “That helps the ball in straightening and when it did, Smith edged it. For Siraj, the main thing is the wrist behind the ball. That’s the sign; for him if that happens, it means other things are in place: he is not falling away, he is not pushing the ball down, and he is hitting the right lengths,” he says.
Bharat, who has mentored Mohammed Siraj through his first-class years, knows what will work for him. (AP/BCCI) 
Share
