From grief to glory - Akash Deep's spell of a lifetime

In another timeline, one in which India fail to win at Edgbaston or win it through someone else's heroics, Akash Deep wouldn't have been interviewed, he wouldn't have been overcome with emotion, we wouldn't have discovered the ordeal life has put him through yet again, and he would have quietly just gone on with his ill fortune, as he has done much of his life.

It was a poignant moment, with ecstatic scenes of a Test win around him: Akash Deep telling Cheteshwar Pujara he wanted to dedicate the win to his sister, who had been diagnosed with cancer two months ago. One match-winner to another, who is now a broadcaster, somebody who lost his mother to cancer as a young boy. Veterans of hard knocks in life, well aware of what it is to be a common person in India and the desperation needed to come out of that commonness through cricket, one of the rare legal routes to upward mobility in India.

Eight or so years ago, Akash Deep lost his father after a stroke and consequent paralysis. A couple of months after that, one of his brothers caught a cold, a common cold. In his small town, he wasn't diagnosed properly and died on the way to the nearest city, Varanasi.

Akash Deep was born an ordinary Indian with an ordinary build into an ordinary Indian family in an ordinary small town of an ordinary state that didn't have a cricket association. He was given more than his fair share of misfortune, but also the rare gift to endure it with equanimity and find the heart to keep moving on, to choose to be happy after experiencing all kinds of trauma.

His happiness was cricket. Even when his father was alive and disapproving of the game, Akash Deep left home on the pretext of looking for a job but kept at cricket and started to send home a part of the stipend he was making playing for small-time clubs.

We wondered if he was on a hiding to nothing when asked to replace Jasprit Bumrah in what has been carrying an image of being a Bumrah-or-nothing team. Such thoughts would have entered his mind only if he had ever got anything easy in life. The flat pitch minus Bumrah in the attack was a challenge but it must have paled in front of the ones he had overcome.

While doing so, Akash Deep developed a bowling style that gave him a chance. Incidentally, a meeting with Mohammed Shami when Akash Deep was still an erratic newcomer in the Bengal team turned it around for him. Shami told him what he needed to stay fit to be able to sustain the intensity and the accuracy.

Akash Deep came to the India team as the closest resemblance to Shami in world cricket. The release is perhaps not as pristine as Shami's, but he runs through the crease, extracts any seam movement that there might be, and always appears to hurry batters up. All these things happen because Akash Deep has a high release and quick arm action.

Of all the fast bowlers India have in England, only Prasidh Krishna has a higher release point, but only slightly. Their average release height is only 0.013 metres apart despite a 0.03m difference in height. Akash Deep releases the ball from a higher point than Josh Tongue and Ben Stokes. A higher release point and the near-perfect upright seam on release are what help him draw seam movement from the surface. It is possible that when the ball seams, it makes the batter react in a hurry, which gives the impression that he is a skiddy bowler.

Akash Deep also taught a lesson or two to the host bowlers on how to bowl on a designer flat pitch. He repeatedly kept going wide on the crease to target the channel around the off stump. When he wanted the ball to seam away, he went wider on the crease and really full. It doesn't always work. You can only aim for it. When it does, it becomes memorable as in the wickets of Ollie Pope in the first innings and Joe Root in the second. Between the two innings, Tongue used the same ploy to get KL Rahul out.

Like Shami, Akash Deep kept going when on a roll. On the final morning, Shubman Gill gave an over to Prasidh to execute a change of ends to bring Akash Deep to his desired end. However, Gill saw that Prasidh was in good rhythm and gave him a spell.

It didn't bother Akash Deep at all - he bowled a spell of 6-1-22-2 from the "wrong" end to kickstart India's final push for victory.

This was nothing but Akash Deep putting his head down quietly expecting his poor luck in Australia during the Border-Gavaskar Trophy 2024-25 - when he kept going past the bat without success, drawing special praise from Steven Smith, and then getting injured - to continue. In between Tests, he perhaps spent more time in hospitals meeting specialists than on the cricket field. During IPL 2025, where he represented Lucknow Super Giants and played six matches, he would visit his sister in the hospital almost every night that he was in Lucknow.

An unlikely hero in Birmingham, Akash Deep is the first India fast bowler to take a ten-wicket match haul since Umesh Yadav. Even Bumrah doesn't have one. He told Pujara he just wanted to see a smile on his sister's face. There are many more smiling, Akash Deep, and marvelling at your ability to keep going without complaining.