2018 Evolution: Indian World Class Pace-Bowling Unit

By Sandy - Jan 2, 2019 10:25 am

While 2018 just ended, the cricketing year can be easily known as India’s pace-bowling revolution. Even the historically famous pace-bowling cricketing nations ended the year at far behind of the Indian pacers.

Since their debut in international cricket, back in 1932, India never had been considered in international cricket as the top pace-bowling side. Once the former Indian World Cup-winning captain and the legendary Indian pacer Kapil Dev quoted, “There are no fast bowlers in India.”

Also read: Kapil Dev: Jasprit Bumrah Has Proved Me Wrong

It took a long time for the nation to introduce the quality pacers for international cricket. Since India won the first cricket World Cup in 1983, there were some quality pacers started to appear for the nation but mostly failed to play for the long term and especially the Test records were widely weaker.

In between this time, we can take some names like Javagal Srinath, Ajit Agarkar, Venkatesh Prasad, Manoj Prabhakar, Chetan Sharma etc. but the nation was far away to become a top pace-bowling side.

The left-arm pacer Zaheer Khan began a new generation since the 2000 era. Since then, many talented pacers have joined the national side. We can take a long list from that time. While some players have failed to carry their success for a long time due to mostly fitness issues (like Irfan Pathan, RP Singh, S Sreesanth, Praveen Kumar, Munaf Patel etc.), few were successful to guide their career for a long time, even they also had to battle against the strong injuries (Zaheer Khan, Ashish Nehra etc.). Though those sides were trying to become the top pace-bowling side in international cricket, those were too inconsistent as the bowling unit.

However, that generation opened the pathway for the shining future that we are seeing now. Indian pace side has grown up slowly but steadily and now it is dominating all over the world. Once India was known as the superpower spin-bowling or strong batting nation but now the pace-bowling unit is guiding the team.

Historically, India never had been considered as the top pace-bowling sides in the cricket world. But at present, India has the best bowling unit in the cricket world with the proper international level skills and variations.

The Indian pacer Jasprit Bumrah was the leading wicket-taker in 2018 international cricket as he picked up 78 wickets in 2018 international cricket with the average of 20.39. As most of the other Indian pacers didn’t play the international matches regularly in 2018, they are not in this top-bowling list but they also have the eye-catching bowling performances when they got their opportunities.