da betsson： Following ankle surgery and a knee issue, the 34-year old restated his class with 5 for 53 against Bangladesh

da supremo： Andrew Fidel Fernando20-Feb-20251:41

Kumble: Shami used the cutter to great effect

Eventually we all get old and the body just ain’t what it used to be. The joints feel weird in rooms where the air conditioning is too strong. You twinge an oblique muscle reaching for the remote. You dislocate a kneecap and make up a story about how you did it playing football, when really you had slipped in the shower.And where sleep used to be the thing that fixed your ailments, at some point in your 30s, your body decides there is a correct way and an incorrect way to sleep, and man, you had better not mess it up because otherwise your neck is going to pay for it for a week.Mohammed Shami has been coming to terms with these truths over the past 14 months too. He’s in his mid-30s, which is about the age at which the body’s natural unclehood starts to set in.The difference is that his is a body that bowls fast at the elite level, which, you know, is one of the most impressive things a human body can do. And Shami was doing this already-impressive thing especially impressively.Few bowlers have ever had a tournament like Shami’s 2023 World Cup. He rolled up part-way through it, scythed through 24 batters in seven matches, and averaged 10.70 in India’s run to the final. His right ankle, it turns out, was hurting him right through those spells. Just as he was hitting some of the greatest rhythm of his life that body had begun to let him down. The Achilles tendon needed surgery.Could another ICC tournament bend to Shami’s whim?•Associated PressThere is something profoundly humanising about fast bowlers confronting their physical fragility. Dale Steyn, one of cricket’s most menacing figures ever, said he would “have a little cry” and “throw [his] toys around the cot a little bit” when the injuries piled up towards the end of his career. Shami wasn’t admitting to tantrums, but he too used the language of childhood to describe his recovery process. “It felt like I was starting over, like a toddler learning how to walk,” he said of putting his surgery-addled foot on the ground for the first time.You could be one of the finest quicks your country has produced. You could have thrilled hundreds of millions with spectacular World Cup spells, and turned Ben Stokes into a brain-melted mess as a stadium roared for you in Lucknow. But you go to enough hospitals, see enough X-rays and MRI scans, have enough medical professionals comment on swelling, bleeding, ruptures, bone stress, etc, and it is hammered into you that you are a skin-bag filled with bones, flesh, organs, blood, plus some extras, just like the person who is slipping in the shower and dislocating their knee. What a distance to fall.And what a distance to travel to return to where your body once had been. Fast-bowling fitness is not like batting fitness, or even spin-bowling fitness. Your workload will almost always be more taxing than any other kind of cricketer in the team. Your knees not only have to climb or descend stairs, they have to withstand several times your body weight with each delivery, and you likely have to repeat that dozens of times a day. Part-way through his Achilles recovery, his left knee – the one right-arm bowlers put the most stress on – gave way, substantially extending his recovery period.Related

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There is some understanding here, and in this India team, there appears to be a lot of space for Shami to be less than what he used to be, at least while he’s feeling his way back into the game. “All we wanted with Shami was to get back to wearing Indian colours more than anything else,” Rohit Sharma said of Shami’s comeback in the recent England series, in which his returns were middling. “Whether he took wickets or not was completely immaterial to us.”But wickets are not immaterial to top-quality bowlers. In professional sports, the goodwill you have earned with your team only lasts so long. At some point, there had to be some big numbers in that wickets’ column. Such is his quality as a bowler, it didn’t take long for Shami to get there.Many of the Shami hallmarks were there in this spell. The ball seamed viciously early on, Soumya Sarkar not quite the mess Stokes had been, but this may only be because he faced just five deliveries from Shami, one which jagged back at him and found the inside edge, followed by KL Rahul’s gloves. Shami was mostly moving it in one direction on Thursday, and it was the outside edge of the right-hand batters he tested. One of those awayseamers soon kissed Mehidy Hasan Miraz’s bat, and Shubman Gill snaffled the chance in the cordon.This was not premium Shami. There were errors in length. There were occasional strayings too far down the off side with the new ball. But in between the messy deliveries, Shami also played the hits. When he came back at the death, there were wide, full deliveries with the off side stacked, decent slower ones, the occasional bouncer, and three further wickets to complete the five-wicket haul. The consistency wasn’t quite there. The rhythm wasn’t 100% back. But his best balls – yeah, there were plenty of those – had survived the surgery, and the arduous trek back to fast-bowling fitness.From doubt and rehab to elation and relief•Getty Images”Those 14 months were very tough because you have to do the same things again and again, those things pinch you and you feel the pain 24 hours a day,” he said. “Every person wants to continue their good form, but you can never say for how long such things continue. I always ask myself if I’m satisfied with my performances according to my role. Especially in ICC events, I know that even if I leak plenty of runs, I should at least try to get some wickets.”Ideally, Jasprit Bumrah would have been here to ease his return, but he’s confronting his own fragility right now. There is no question that, particularly in Asian conditions, they make each other greater.But India play every one of their games in Dubai, the cricket world in constant thrall of the money their board brings in. If Thursday’s track was anything to go by, the pitches in Dubai are likely to be similar for the rest of the tournament. As they had been in heavy use during the ILT20, these essentially are pitches that are described as “tired” – as if it is the pitch’s job to summon the energy to rush the ball on to the batter – and these ones are feeling a bit of a nap coming on.What this really means is that there is likely to be less bounce for the duration of the tournament in Dubai. The ball is likely to be a little slower, and occasionally it will skid. What we are describing, essentially, are the perfect conditions for Shami.Whether all that will play out remains to be seen. For now, this is enough. Shami is back. His skin-bag of flesh, bones, blood, and guts is doing the thing we are used to watching it do. And we are in the earliest days yet, but he is, at this moment the highest wicket-taker in another big ODI tournament.