Age of India’s pace attack in the recent series.
Bumrah - 28
Shami - 31
Yadav - 34
Sharma - 33
Thakur - 30
Compared to Pakistan’s.
Shaheen - 21
Hassan - 27
Faheem - 27
Abbas - 31 (+4)
Dahani - 23
4/5 bowlers in the Indian team are past their peak, they’ll be gone in the next 4 years. Bumrah will be 32 and past his peak by then.
India’s future doesn’t look too bright in terms of their bowling attack.
As someone who has seen the last two QEA trophies extensively, these are my observations on Pakistan's bowling resources.
Hasan needs a specific set of conditions to be successful. He's a skiddy bowler who needs the pitch to be abrasive with low bounce for his in-cutter to become successful. He's neither consistent with line nor length and is prone to bowling many no-balls. He may prove me wrong but from the body of work that he has behind him, he's not world-class yet and totally unproven in alien conditions.
Faheem makes it to the team only as an all-rounder and that too is due to his good batting form over the last season. His bowling is not even close to being test class. His domestic team even gives him the new ball when he plays but he still hasn't done anything of note.
Abbas is pretty much done for. He has lost his pace and the zip that he got for a short while in 2018. It will be surprising to see him play ever again for Pakistan. Coaching and county cricket is his best bet for a career in cricket, I feel.
Dahani is an absolute rookie who has no clue how to set up batters in the longer format. Sindh didn't make it to the finals because of the inability of Hasnain and Dahani to exert pressure after the opening bowlers ended their first spell. As much as we wish for him to be successful, he's nowhere near test class at this moment.
Shaheen - the only one who makes it to the team without question. There's too much burden on him and we need to carefully manage him. He's also the only bowler who can make it in the bowling attack of the neighbors (any team would be lucky to have him).
There's also no one in the domestic circuit who's ready for long format.
KPK has some good prospects in Irfanullah, Sameen, Arshad, & Wasim but they all need to learn the art of length bowling.
Balochistan has Akif but he's injury-prone. The other bowlers are in fact so ordinary that I can't even remember their names without serious thinking (Taj and Najeeb are the only two I can recall for now)
Northern has Athar but he's Hasan Ali lite. Kashif is a rookie who has height but is short on pace. Musa is well, Musa. They have Amir Jamal but he's an all-rounder and I didn't see him play 4-day matches. They even played Rauf a match and he got six wickets there or something and set up a win for the team.
Sindh has Umar but he's ignored for now and the three seniors they have are Sohail, Tabish, & Mir Hamza and these three are ironically the three most difficult bowlers in the domestic circuit. Hasnain can't pitch the ball at the same spot three balls in a row to save his life at the moment.
Southern Punjab literally has an army of trundlers and so-called batting all-rounders that neither score too heavily nor take too many wickets. Randhawa, Talat, & Yamin are the guilty three who headline this mediocrity. Ilyas is skilled but he is short and hence unable to get the desired bounce that you need to trouble high-quality batters consistently. I'm not even sure what happened to Zia ul Haq. He's stringier than a bean pole and looks like someone whose heart is not in the sport anymore. He's probably just waiting for a call from the USA so he can join the MCL or whatever that league is called and chill out with Sami Aslam over the weekdays.
Central Punjab has bowlers who are old and slow. The two Waqas's are their main bowlers when Hasan is away on international duty and both of them look frankly 40 plus instead of being in their 30's (they may well be young, they just look old, tired, and angsty). Ehsan Adil is literally the same as Zia-ul-Haq, they can play as each other in the cricketing field and not a single person will notice any difference except better hair for Ehsan but that's just a minor inconvenience.
I haven't seen second eleven bowlers but if they are playing there, it'll be hard to see them being any better than the first eleven players.
Let's not confuse ourselves between T20 bowling talent and long-format bowlers as both of these areas require a totally different skillset from each other. We definitely do have bowlers aplenty who can clock north of 140 kph in T20's and can bowl a mean yorker every now and then but our long-format bowling cupboard besides Shaheen is pretty bare.
While Shami's original statement may be a bit over the top and more like a rallying cry to motivate his team and get under the skin of the opponents, let's be very clear that the neighbors have an extremely potent test bowling attack suitable for almost all conditions. They lack a left-arm pacer and an out-and-out tall fast bowler (as Ishant has lost considerable pace) but that's a much smaller problem than what we have at our hand.
Please give credit where due instead of just creating a hypothesis that doesn't stand any logical reasoning.
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, and magic happens. Jadeja tried to do the same thing vs Root without any results.
