Mohammed Siraj - Heart on the Sleeve, Heart on the Pitch

On the man who pours himself out for one ball

Have you ever done your job so perfectly that you’ve ended up doing it wrong? Last week, as the blazing London sun began to cast long shadows on the Lord’s turf, Mohammed Siraj had one job: survive. Don’t play a silly shot. Instead, he was middling everything. He was getting behind the line of the ball like a middle-order batter and not the born tailender that he is.

At the other end, Ravindra Jadeja was batting with the serenity of a monk. He even transmitted some of that calmness on to Jasprit Bumrah and Siraj, who have, through this summer, looked like newly-born calves while batting - limbs everywhere, directionally challenged, zero survival skills. But, that afternoon in London, they refused to budge. The mid-morning certainty of a heavy England win had dissolved into a hot afternoon, and then started to slip into the evening. England still needed one wicket to win; India were within sight of the target, inching their way through. The game was on a knife’s edge, and somehow, none of the thirteen pairs of eyes on the field showed the slightest twitch of tension.

Then Shoaib Bashir sauntered in again. Another innocuous over, another innocuous ball. Siraj did everything right. He played the ball with soft hands, bat face angled downwards, dropping the ball’s ricochet near his feet. Rahul Dravid would’ve been proud. But, in the barometer for strength of contact, there is a small red zone just under the arc of green. Siraj’s bat had caressed the ball with such tenderness it retained some of its revolutions upon landing. It landed, backspun, and dribbled onto the stumps. Out. Shoaib Bashir reeled off westwards, surrounded by his teammates.

Four years earlier, on this very turf, Siraj had uprooted a stump with his hands - a clean pickup on a celebratory sprint after spearheading India to one of her most famous Test victories. Today, his feet were frozen. He stared at Jadeja, at the player’s balcony, into the void, eyes flickering but barely able to focus. A couple of seconds later, he crouched down and punched his bat into the pitch.

Credit: Deccan Chronicle

The English players, to the man, came up and wrapped their arms around him. Part in consolation, and part, I assume, in deep respect. A tense finish needs its protagonists from either corner, and Siraj had more than executed his role. The frame of Zak Crawley and Joe Root consoling Siraj will be spoken of for years, as an illustration of what sport can and should look like. But I can’t take my eyes away from the hue of the frame just before that. It’s another shade of sport, and so much about it is quintessentially Siraj.

At a press conference on Monday, Siraj was asked how long the moment gnawed at him. “For a long time,” he said. “I remember in 2021 at Lord’s, I took the last wicket. Then I was in this situation. I am a very emotional person. Jaddu bhai fought hard, Jassi bhai [Bumrah] also fought for 54 balls, but at the end of the day, we lost after working so hard.”

To watch Siraj is to understand why a loss in the third Test of a five-match series cut so deep.

The modern athlete is slick. Their hair is shaped by a stylist with a million Instagram followers, beard trimmed to geometric perfection. They have people - for hair, clothes, words, image, the whole marketing package. Walk down Church Street in Bangalore and you’ll find their training gear on mannequins, styled for streets and karaoke nights. In media interviews, you get the kind of cliches that come across as a chatbot output. A defeat is never painful, merely something to “pick positives from and take those learnings ahead.” A victory is another milestone in “the process.”

Siraj has a lot of those trappings too. He wears a Whoop smartwatch - the one endorsed by Cristiano Ronaldo, Michael Phelps, and Rory McIlroy. He starts a Test series with one hairstyle and ends it with another. The beard vectors are streamlined. Except, he wears these as ornaments, detachables on the skin that’s all him.

There is a glint in Siraj’s eyes when he sits in front of a microphone. Not the glib composure of a man used to the stage, but something searching, almost bashful. The words take their own time, coming in starts and stops, as if they must be coaxed from behind a closed door. It isn’t that he is at a loss, only that the world has not yet pressed him often enough for his voice. Yet, the glint is insistent. He wants to speak. When he speaks of that bruising defeat, there’s no well-worn script, no platitudes about lessons learned or moving on. Instead, Siraj offers something rarer: the raw, unvarnished account of his own reconciliation, of long nights wrestling with the loss, of the two Tests that still lied ahead.

The most famous thing he has ever said is now a meme. He was standing on the rain-soaked grass of Kensington Oval in Barbados, tears pouring from his eyes, hands not knowing where to go, mind still stretching for words, pushing them to form sentences. It was in the minutes after the T20 World Cup final in 2024, a game Siraj hadn’t played in, but lived every minute of. Six months previously, at the end of another World Cup final, Jasprit Bumrah had to put his arms around a disconsolate Siraj. At Barbados, Siraj had some words. “I am only believe on Jassi bhai.”

Writers queue up to describe Bumrah. Some have conjured up enough beauty to make it to his autobiography’s back cover. Heck, even Chris Martin sang a verse to him. But Siraj’s words have stuck, and they’ll live longer in public consciousness. Maybe because the pauses, the breaks, the quivering voice was all real, all Siraj.

On the RCB podcast, Siraj talks about his time with the Hyderabad team. He is in a studio, sitting on a plush, comfortable chair, speaking to a seasoned conversationalist in Danish Sait, but the rhythm to his words still comes out a little jagged, even in his Hyderabadi Hindi. “Mere paas Platina thi. Usko slope pe dhakal ke start karna padta tha. Hyderabad ki poori team practice ke baad car mei aate the. Mere paas Platina. Main ruk jaata tha. Bahut embarass hota tha mai.” [I had a Bajaj Platina scooter. Down the slope, you had to push to get it going. Everyone else would come and leave in cars. I’d wait for them to go before pushing and pulling at my scooter. I’d be very embarrassed.]

It’s not the kind of story he narrates often, but the kind he carries with him.

On 20 November, 2020. Mohammad Siraj lost his father. India were in Australia for a long tour. The Covid protocols read like military regulations - which floor you could walk on, how many people allowed in a corridor, which specific corners of which lobbies you could inhabit during quarantine. None of Siraj’s teammates or coaches could go to his room to give him a hug; phone calls across the hall had to suffice. Siraj was offered the chance to take the next available flight back home. But home meant quarantine, which meant missing the Test series that would start in December. He stayed put.

A month from that night, he made his Test debut on the hallowed turf of the Melbourne Cricket Ground. When Ravichandran Ashwin handed him the navy blue India cap, he held back tears, looked towards the sky, and told whoever was listening, “Mere abbu ne mujhe yeh mauka diya he, aur iss mauke ka pura fayda uthaunga (My father has given me this opportunity, and I will make the most of it).” When the national anthem played on the speakers, Siraj couldn’t hold back anymore. The tear that had been building since November finally escaped, tracing a single line down his left cheek. For the dream fulfilled, and for the man who couldn’t be here to bless him.

Within three weeks, Siraj was leading an injury-ravaged pace attack, pounding the pitch relentlessly as India won the most impossible match and series in their history. In the second innings of that Brisbane Test, Siraj took five wickets, and left the field to a standing ovation. But, when you mention Brisbane 2021, and see the eyes of many light up, which names roll off the tongue? Pant, Pujara, Gill, Rahane? Washington Sundar? Rightly so, for they were the protagonists. Somewhere in the footnotes: a 26-year-old from Hyderabad, playing his debut series, holding together an attack that had already crumbled.

It’s been four and a bit years, a lot of wickets, and many memorable spells since. And yet, there seems to be a weird anxiety, a timeless arm-wrestle to truly belong.

For starters, Siraj doesn’t slip into the boxes we’ve made to store our new treasures from the last decade of fast bowling. Bumrah is a genius, Shami is a Louvre-candidate, Ishant was a lambi race ka ghoda, and Umesh was an explosive device. Clean categories, easy narratives. Siraj floats somewhere in the middle of them all. Some days, he’s the aggressive option; some days, he is the control bowler; most days, he has to be the workhorse. Many days, he is asked to do a bit of everything. As a result, he is constantly having to prove himself, auditioning for an imaginary role, even though there’s enough evidence to what he brings.

Here’s a sample: placing a filter for fast bowlers with 100 Test wickets, he has the fifth best average amongst Indian men. Higher than greats and luminaries like Zaheer Khan, Ishant, Umesh, Irfan Pathan. The core anxiety of being Siraj is that he’s rarely given the credit for being very, very good at what he does.

I remember a conversation with a friend who follows cricket very closely, whose intellect and analytical skills I have a lot of admiration for. It must’ve been in the first week of the 2023 Men’s ODI World Cup. India could only play two out-and-out fast bowlers, so they went for Bumrah and Siraj. My friend texted, in simple, easy, language, “Hatao yaar Siraj ko. Shami lao.” Mohammed Shami came in eventually, and set the World Cup alight. So my friend was technically correct in his demands. But did he know - or more likely, acknowledge - at the time of his exasperation that Siraj was the number 1 ranked ODI bowler in the world?

In his defence, my Nostradamus-impersonating friend wasn’t alone. Through the World Cup, Siraj had done his job with the new ball, pairing up with Bumrah to set the tone in every one of India’s ten matches. But in the final, defending a thin total, captain Rohit Sharma handed the ball to Shami. Hindsight’s 20/20 vision aside, it was a deviation from what had worked remarkably well for a month. But even so, I think I know why Rohit didn’t instinctively give the ball to Siraj.

See, top fast bowlers give their captains a sense of tactical and emotional predictability. Yes, you’d like them angry, fired up, willing to bowl fast enough to impart some fear into the batter, but you’d want them to do that with their best deliveries. Which most do. With Siraj, you get the sense that he isn’t just putting the physical effort that a fast bowler has to; he’s putting all his being into it. He’s getting into a 1v1 battle with the batter. If laws allowed it, he would yell in the batter’s face after every ball.

At times, the other guy hits back. Fast bowlers anyway don’t like getting hit; Siraj takes it as an insult. So he starts going harder, and begins to deviate from his plans to get into a fist fight between bat and ball. A couple of more hits later, he goes harder. At this point, he’ll bowl a searing bouncer that whizzes past the grill of a batter’s helmet, and then walk up to the batter to offer a few choice words. It doesn’t always end well. Forget how it looks on camera, it must be vexing for the captain too. The last thing you want is to leak runs.

Eventually, the captain has to pull him away from the firing line. And you can see the disappointment in Siraj’s face when that happens. It’s not necessarily aimed at his captain, but at not getting more chances to punch back. There is a bit of frustration in the captain’s face too, a look of “Kya yaar, Miyan..”

And yet, no captain ever loses faith in him. Why would they? There aren’t too many who can guarantee a 7/10 display in skill, intensity, endurance, and exuberance for hours on end, and then do it again. How many others will keep chirping in your ears to give him the ball as a late-March sun is baking down in a dry, arid plateau in Central India?

Since his debut, only Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc have played more Test matches than his 39 as specialist fast bowlers. Every other fast bowler India’s tried has either had injury issues, faded, or been found wanting. Siraj keeps running in, day after day, week after week, in Mumbai and Melbourne.

Credit: BhaskarEnglish

I wrote most of this essay on the morning of the fourth Test in Manchester. It’s always a bit dangerous preemptively zooming too hard on one player. The game could go either way. Well, spoiler alert, the game did not go well for India’s bowlers. England piled on the runs, and almost everyone got carted around, Siraj included. Worse still, Siraj got an ankle injury midway through the England inning, and had to walk off the pitch.

The numbers tell a story. At the point of him hobbling up the stairs to the Old Trafford dressing room, he was only behind Ben Stokes for the most wickets in this series, and ahead of every Indian bowler for the number of overs bowled. And there isn’t a word said about giving him a break, or managing his workload, or maybe resting him for the final Test. Siraj wouldn’t entertain that kind of chat.

So he walked back down from the physio’s room, pounded the pitch, and got a wicket.

As Shubman Gill builds his first team, he will be desperate to have Siraj as a pillar in his corner. In a young pack trying to find their tone, you want someone who understands the fundamentals of collective effort. You want someone who defends 140 like it’s 401; who dives at mid-on like the match depends on saving that single, because maybe it does; who celebrates his fellow-bowler’s fiver like it’s Diwali, because in that moment, for that player, it is.

Some days, it will mean a 15% fine for the send-off that ended up too physically close. Some days, it will mean having to endure him going into an elaborate, practiced celebration after getting an opposition tailender out while the game’s completely lost from his team’s control. And some days, when a tall building of Jenga falls apart because he touched one piece for a breath too long, there will be tears.

Most teams would give an arm and a leg to have someone this good who cares that much.