Siraj's wobble-seam wizardry brings Ahmedabad alive

Getting squared up isn't a good look for anyone, but sometimes a batter gets a ball so good there's little else they can do.

Mohammed Siraj bowled a ball like this to Roston Chase on Thursday in Ahmedabad. Pretty much every cue the batter must have picked up in the split-seconds either side of the ball leaving the bowler's hand must have told him it was coming into him. There was, first of all, Siraj's beyond-the-perpendicular release, which always creates a natural angle into the right-hand batter. Then it swung in further - 0.7 degrees according to ball-tracking data.

Chase must have also seen the seam coming out scrambled. When Siraj releases the ball like this, it invariably behaves like an offcutter, nipping into the right-hander and away from the left-hander.

Well, not invariably. Not this ball. This one pitched and straightened, seaming away 0.7 degrees. And suddenly, Chase's perfectly reasonable idea of looking to work the ball into the on side looked very, very silly. All he managed was a sliver of leading edge to the wicketkeeper, and West Indies were 105 for 6, with four of those wickets falling to Siraj.

If the first three had made for satisfying watching for Siraj's growing ranks of fans, this one must have made them jump out of their seats. What had happened here? Was this a moment of pure randomness, the ball deviating in an unexpected way because it had happened to land in a particular way, with the edge of the seam happening to make contact with a grassy, responsive pitch at a particularly opportune angle?

Or had Siraj willed this? Was this a new variation, a new addition to his wobble-seam repertoire?

"The wobble-seam [ball] is like this, that it sometimes straightens and sometimes cuts [into the right-hand batter]," Siraj said at his press conference at the end of the day's play. "That ball kind of straightened towards the shiny side. I mostly look to move the wobble-seam [ball] in, but it kept straightening towards the shiny side, and took the edge, caught behind."

From this it seems that ball may have been something of a happy accident - one that Siraj knows can happen from time to time, but not one he can will into occurring. He may deliver some of his wobble-seam balls with the shiny side facing into the batter, some with the shiny side facing away, and this may well influence the way the ball behaves before pitching, but what happens after isn't entirely in his control.

It's a very Siraj kind of delivery, because which cricketer in the world has a better understanding of what's in their control and what isn't?

This is a man who, from November 2024 to August 2025, bowled tirelessly and with immense skill, control and smarts across ten Tests in Australia and England, who seldom wavered from good lines and lengths, seldom let his intensity drop, almost always gave batters reason to worry about both their edges, and yet ended up averaging 31.15 and 32.43 in those two series. Even as luckless spell followed luckless spell, he never lost his ironclad belief in his processes, and though he found belated reward and recognition by the time he willed India to a series-levelling victory at The Oval with one of the great Test-match displays by an India fast bowler, his career numbers continued to do him no justice.

Thursday was a day of redressal. Tagenarine Chanderpaul strangled him down the leg side. Brandon King shouldered arms to a ball that knocked back middle stump without having deviated in an unusual or unpredictable way. Alick Athanaze edged him, rather than playing and missing, when he chased at a wide tempter, and second slip held on to the chance rather than grassing it.

And now the gods had given him a bit of a hand, coaxing this wobble-seam ball to Chase to behave the way it did.

Siraj had earned every bit of good fortune, of course. It was reward for all the work he's put in over all the months and years of his career, and for all the work he had put in on this new day, another day of impeccable lengths, buzzing intensity, and the relentless threat of movement in either direction, in the air and off the pitch.

At his press conference, someone suggested to him that it must have been a relief to get his wickets as quickly as he did today, against lower-ranked opposition, after all the toil he'd endured in England. Without ever losing his sweetly polite manner, he made it clear that the question wounded him.

"Sir, even here I took four wickets only by working hard," Siraj said. "You only get wickets by working hard. I got wickets in England by working hard, and I worked hard for them here too. It isn't as if anyone gave me wickets free of cost. No one gave me that fifth wicket. All four wickets came from hard work."

It was clear how much a fifth wicket - all five of his Test-match five-fors have come away from home - would have meant to Siraj. He nearly got it when he had an lbw appeal against a shuffling Justin Greaves upheld only for DRS to save the batter, with ball-tracking suggesting his inducker would have missed leg stump.

It was as if the cricketing gods had spoken again. Even on this day of redressal, not everything would go Siraj's way.