Not all days belong to Mohammed Siraj. But on those days that belong to him, he is the storm in the September Colombo air; or the scorch in the January Cape Town Sun.
Dazzled batsmen cannot pick the cues, cannot spot the difference. He bowls as he always bowls. As if every ball is his first, final and only ball, with the same perturbed face of a rebel, the same energetic strides of a man on the run, the same gung-ho leap of a tiger as he reaches the crease and the same primal scream at the follow-through. If you want to capture the incredible energy it requires to hurl a sphere of leather across a 22-yard strip, just watch Siraj coil, and uncoil, at the crease.
Siraj is often pure theatre, a blur of loose limbs whirring and whirling — like the batsmen of Hyderabad seem to have elastic limbs—twisting the ball this way and that. If the zippy run-up is dramatic enough, the expressions that flicker across his face make you wonder whether he could be trained into an actor. But he draws the line, for he is expressive without bordering on arrogance, ebullient without being hysteric, emotional though not melodramatic, ever-smiling but not over-friendly. He does not brood over what he has lost but picks up new tricks — he once lost his ability to bowl out-swing but quickly developed the wobble-seamer.
Some days are his; some days less so. But on those days that are his, he becomes the master of quick kill. In 16 balls, he grabbed six wickets and sunk Sri Lanka in the Asia Cup; in 54 balls, he drowned South Africa in Cape Town. He’s the king of the quick kill. Not that his form fluctuates wildly. In 10 of his 42 outings, he has picked three or more wickets; one in every four ODIs, he picks a minimum of three wickets. But the impression remains that he picks his wickets in heaps and piles; and thus a false impression that he endures barren spells between bursts of bounty.
Some of his early coaches too swear by his skill to pick wickets in haste. “I was not surprised when he took six wickets in 16 balls against Bangladesh,” Mohammed Mahboob Ahmed, secretary of his first club, says. “He was a terror for batsmen in the club circuit. When he strikes rhythm, he runs through the sides in no time. I remember another bowler asking me, why does he always take the edge, while I end up just beating batsmen?” Ahmed’s answer was simple yet the ultimate truth of bowling: “He hits the perfect length.”
India’s Mohammed Siraj celebrates a wicket with teammates on the first day of the second Test cricket match between India and South Africa, at the Newlands Cricket Ground, in Cape Town, South Africa, Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024. (PTI Photo/Atul Yadav)
In both Cape Town and Colombo — and let you not forget Brisbane and Lord’s — his lengths were magnificent, landing the ball just a smidgeon from where the good-length area starts. He then toys with the line, teasing and taunting batsmen to commit to a stroke, often a feeble defensive thrust outside the off-stump.
The feast-or-famine misinterpretation only embellishes his aura. It’s more exciting to watch a volatile fast bowler than a steady one. If Mohammed Shami tickles the aesthetics, if Jasprit Bumrah titillates the sense of wonderment, then Siraj assaults your cardiac rhythms. It could beat both mildly and wildly.
Like all three, he is a natural too — unstained by conventions, a product of the milieu, society and culture he grew up in, groomed by wise men who knew how to harness his potential.
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Hyderabad, the city Siraj grew up in and the spirit he embodies does not wear its love and adulation on the numerous billboards of politicians and film stars that dot the crammed roads. There is Chiranjeevi peering at you from most bends; the gaze of NTR or YSR is inescapable. Not even the sport-shops hang his posters. Even the lanes that lead to his old house in Tolichowki — where now his brothers stay — are disturbingly quiet. His passing mention, though, would break the ice even among absolute strangers. The residents, leaving aside their stories, would offer a verbal biography of their beloved “Sira.”
Yet, whenever Siraj comes to bowl, the city stops, the city bleeds, the city soaks in his energy. Even celebrities and politicians leave their chores aside to watch him bowl. Excitement gushes in the voice of Asaduddin Salahuddin Owaisi, the Member of Parliament, from Hyderabad. “He is one of the bowlers who looks like picking a wicket every other ball. He keeps us hooked on him. We get a feeling that anything could happen at any time, be it the first or the last over,” says Owaisi.
Siraj is unputdownable, Owaisi says. “Everything about him is touching, the story of his life we all know, the mental toughness he showed when putting his country above his personal loss. It moves me to tears every time I read about his story,” he says.
The story is well-documented — the son of a rickshaw driver who started playing tennis-ball cricket for a living becoming a million-dollar IPL player and then emerging as one of the most trusted cross-format bowlers of his country.
But it is the hardships that made and now define him. “The best thing about him I believe is that he did not have any formal training. It could have ruined him. There is no greater teacher than experience, and he must have learned a lot when playing tennis-ball cricket on the streets and maidans of the city,” Owaisi says.
No one tried to curb the naturalness of Siraj. A natural, that was his first formal coach Arshad Ayub’s initial impression of Siraj. “It took me just 10 minutes to find that spark in him and understand that he is natural. I don’t think I have seen any bowler from Hyderabad who could bowl as fast as Siraj could, ever in my life,” he says.
The hardships he endured toughened him up. “Even when he was at the academy, he used to play hard tennis ball games for money, so that he could support his family. Later, we had to tell him to focus entirely on the leather ball. He did,” remembers Ayub.
The virtues he imbibed from the tennis-ball circuit remain undisturbed. “He developed the fighting spirit as well as the ability to learn things fast. He had an eye for picking new variations and the commitment to polish it,” he says.
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Man as a product of the environment reverberates in both Siraj and Hyderabad cricket. Myths and legends blend and whirl through the glassed skyscrapers of the new city and intricately-sculpted minarets of the old town, where the grandeur of the past blends seamlessly with the ornateness of the present.
The names of the greats from the erstwhile princely state roll out of Owaisi’s tongue like a stream, before he pauses at one. “Pataudi, Jaisimha, Baig…. of course Abid Ali.” The medium-pace-bowling all-rounder, he of a splendorous toothbrush moustache and lustrous, long sideburns, was one of his idols. “Oh, what a cricketer!” he exclaims.
Ali, fondly called Chicha (father’s younger brother literally and a friend figuratively), snaffled six wickets on debut, among them were Bob Simpson and Bill Lawry, scored six half-centuries, hit the winning runs in the Oval Test of 1971, used to keep wickets for his domestic team and club and was an agile fielder. He had a lethal variation the locals called ‘sirra’, one that shot along the ground.
The wrist is at the heart of Siraj’s wobble-seamer. He locks the wrists during release so that the ball is not pushed out of his hand and the ball wobbles. (AP Photo/Rafiq Maqbool)
One of his spiritual heirs, the off-spin-wielding all-rounder Arshad Ayub remembers that ball. “Don’t know how he managed them, but the ball just skidded on. He bowled just medium pace, but that ball was often unplayable and got a lot of wickets with that,” Ayub says.
After him, there was Mumtaz Ali, who could bowl both left-arm orthodox and left-arm wrist-spin, the wrong’un and armer. Before him was the stylish off-spinner Ghulam Ahmed. His twirly successor, Ayub bowled the one that spun away. “Cut away,” he emphasises, “because it was nothing but a leg-cutter.”
The batsmen square-cut through covers, cover-drove with a semi-horizontal blade, fetched the ball from sixth stump to square leg, coaxed the ball on leg-stump through extra cover. It was as though they followed a different code of cricket, as though their bones bend and willows curve and crook to the whim of the mind.
In these days of cricket star manufacturing, they merely churn out naturals. Hyderabad is cricket’s eternal non-conformists.
The characteristic wristiness originates from the matted wickets used here. The bounce off matting wickets could be wayward, so the batsmen end up using their wrists to douse the bounce. The ball bounced nice and true with the new ball that Ali had to discover the sirra. The wrist is at the heart of Siraj’s wobble-seamer too. He locks the wrists during release so that the ball is not pushed out of his hand and the ball wobbles.
That he is the most eminent manipulator of this fad in his country could not be merely a twist of fate. Who else could master the dark and the outrageous arts more expertly than someone from Hyderabad? There could be the historic rationale behind their artistry — in the heyday of Nizams, performing artists, sculptors, artists and musicians flocked to the city. The city oozes with romance because it was founded on a tale of love.
The story goes that a young Muslim prince met a Hindu girl, fell in love with her, married her and named the city Bhagyanagar (her name was Bhagyamati). It later became Hyderabad. And the virtues that made the city manifested itself through a fast-bowling craftsman of rare artistry and rarer personality.
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India’s Mohammed Siraj celebrates the wicket of Pakistan captain Babar Azam during the ICC Men’s cricket World Cup match between India and Pakistan at Narendra Modi stadium in Ahmedabad on Saturday. (Express photo by Nirmal Harindran, 14-10-2023, Ahmedabad)
Dust blows from the ragged Eidgah Maidan in the First Lancer locale of Old Hyderabad. It’s literally a dust-bowl. Columns of expressionless houses, the navy-blue paint reeling off the walls, dot either side of the grounds. At the entrance, or what the locals call the entrance, is the tomb of a 19th-century saint who supposedly was a miracle healer. His ghost still roams in the night, snatching goats and chickens in the neighbourhood, the locals believe. But the tattered brown tiles of his tomb are strewn with cigarette butts. Most times of the day, the ground is vacant, except for teenagers on bikers without silencers. When evening dawns, the ground gradually fills. Some are on the way to a mosque in the neighbourhood, but most are there to play cricket with a hard tennis ball, sometimes taped, sometimes not. One rectangular maidan becomes maidans for many. People of all age groups converge, from children who are only as tall as the stumps, or those with thinning grey hairs. Almost everyone has a Siraj story, either he is a friend of a friend of a friend or the cousin of a cousin. Or the boastful one that claims he was the only batsman Siraj dreaded. But every story starts and ends with Siraj.
On this ground, though, Siraj honed his bowling skills. “It’s the ground that made him, and made our friendships,” says his close friend Mohammed Shafi, who now works with The Golconda Mandal Revenue. He vividly remembers those days when they used to squeeze into packed buses from their homes in Khaja Nagar. “We spent most of our teenage years here, playing cricket, talking cricket, talking life, seeing life,” he says.
Watching a match unfold here, you realise the ground is to bowl. It’s neither matted nor concrete, just loose black soil. Bowlers expend all their energy just to see the ball die shin-high.
On this wicket, though, Siraj found means to make the ball bounce, Shafi says. “I don’t know how he did all these but he somehow managed things that others did not. He used to bowl all the time, and when a variation caught his imagination, he would practice it until he mastered it. ”
When there was no match in the locality, they would travel to the neighboring towns to play tennis ball cricket tournaments. There was nothing for him beyond the game. With the money he saved from winning games, Siraj finally bought a bike, a Bajaj Platina. “I remember the evening we rode this bike to the ground,” he says.
Later, Shafi would quit the game, but not the friendship with Siraj. He was often the first person he would call and break some news. He watched him play his first game in Hyderabad; he was beside him when Sunrisers Hyderabad picked him in 2017. One evening, when he returned to India after his coming-of-age tour Down Under, Siraj called Shafi and the pair visited the old ground, one where it all began for him. Here, at the Eidgah Ground in First Lancer, all days belong to Siraj.