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In the dressing room, Suryakumar Yadav and a few of his Duleep Trophy teammates were watching a zeher bowler on television. Two weeks prior, this bowler was a member of their side; but, at that time, he had taken nine wickets while playing for a different team. When he travelled to Chennai to participate in the Test match against Bangladesh, he added two more.
Saurasish Lahiri, who was bowling coach of the India B team, recalls the moment, Suryakumar watching Akash Deep bowl and instinctively saying, “in that typical Bombay style in which he talks, ‘Sir, yeh toh zeher hai.’ He has got so much of venom in his bowling, that’s what he meant to say.”
Lahiri has been watching Akash since he advanced from Bengali club cricket. After a 100-match first-class career, Lahiri found himself going above and above for Akash in his first year as the state’s Under-23 team’s coach, taking him on tour despite an injury.
“I saw him for the first time at the CAB [Cricket Association of Bengal] indoor nets,” Lahiri said. “There was not much of a run-up for the fast bowler there because normally in indoor nets, you bowl just to get the rhythm, to get a feel of bowling. But Akash, from that short run-up, he was absolutely… Very expressive pace. He was really troubling all the batters.”
The speedgun indicated that Akash was bowling in the mid-to-late 130s [kph] area this week when he was in Chennai. Despite this, the two hitters he struck out were both taking late shots. The numbers didn’t add up. It was like being back in the CAB nets. How did he get this speed?
“From his arm action,” Lahiri said. “The arm rotation is so fast that the moment he releases the ball, there is a whip effect on the ball. In tennis we have a word, whip effect. When the ball leaves the racquet in tennis, it’s got a lot of spin, and it just skids through the court. Akash has the same whip effect.”
He gently grasps the ball between his fingers. It snaps into the pitch at his wrist. The fingers glide along the stitching. All of this is the result of a rapid arm movement. Additionally, it produces backspin, which aids Akash in losing less speed as the ball bounces. Because of his exceptional skill at this, Andrew Flintoff appeared to frequently catch Australian hitters off guard during the 2005 Ashes. They seemed set to receive a ball at one pace, but the backspin ensured it was onto them a trifle quicker.
Against Bangladesh, Akash has an additional advantage. He held the ball, which was just eight overs old at the time, with the shiny side on the inside, to both Mominul Haque and Zakir Hasan. This typically indicates that it would travel in the other direction, towards the slips. These didn’t. They entered the left-hand batter with a pitch. because there was an uneven seam. It was swaying.
Even for a homegrown player, Akash’s career is still in its very early stages. It was only five years ago that he made his first-class debut. At some point, the graph that is currently trending upward will encounter a barrier. There will be difficulties, but they may not seem as difficult as the ones he has already faced, such as losing both his parents and his brother in the course of six months and relocating across the nation to follow a vocation that folks in his hometown of Sasaram, Bihar, didn’t think highly of.
Thanks to Akash’s hard work, though, what people are actually saying is “yeh zeher bowler hai.”