The best bowling attack in the world

From Vipul Gupta, India
At the risk of shooting off my mouth and sounding presumptuous, I would like to make a proclamation that our bowling line-up at present is the best in the world.

In Zaheer Khan we have a shrewd canny seasoned professional who is relishing his role as that of the leader of the bowling pack. Ishant Sharma the youngster is improving by leaps and bounds and has surprised everyone with the progress he has made with in the last eighteen months or so. Harbhajan Singh has shown that on his day he can run through any side in the world. Amit Mishra is a leggie in the classical orthodox mould whose virtues are flight, drift, turn and the ability to lure batsmen to their doom.

The ingredients are intoxicating to say the least. A left-armer who can make both the new as well as old ball talk. Zak has shown a terrific understanding of the use of the angles whenever he comes on to bowl round the wicket to the right-handers. And his phenomenal ability to reverse swing early only means that the batsmen can relax at their own peril. Add to that the tall lanky Ishant who with his nagging accuracy and the ability to extract disconcerting bounce even on the most placid of wickets has made it amply clear that he is a force to reckon with at all times. The pressure exerted by these two is unbearable which forces batsmen to commit errors.

The performance of Hayden and Ponting, the two bulwarks of the Aussie batting line up, against these two is a testimony to this fact and had a massive bearing on the ultimate result in the most recently concluded Border-Gavaskar series. Both these bowlers make it very easy for someone like Bhajji to come and bowl to the new batsmen who have not yet got settled in the crease. Furthermore, we are spoilt for choices too and can pick anyone from Mishra, Munaf, RP Singh and Sreesanth to name a few more.

India has a long and impressive history of producing good batsmen, but sadly we have never had confluence of great bowlers at the same time which explains our poor win record. Agreed , that the quartet of Bedi, Prasanna, Chandra, Venkat had their time in the sun, but even they will admit that they could not win as many matches as they would have liked particularly abroad and the presence of a good fast bowler would have definitely helped them.

Kapil Dev shouldered the burden of bowling throughout his career and only K Ghavri and M Prabhakar lent him some support for a brief period of tme. The story was the same with Anl Kumble who ploughed a lone furrow but nevertheless still did a fabulous job as a strike and stock bowler throughout his career. But now I feel that the tide has turned and now we have a bowling Attack that can take 20 wickets in most conditions and on most wickets.

Bowlers are the unsung heroes of this game and it is a misnomer that bowlers will win you only Test matches. Australia has won the last 3 World Cups because their bowlers had pulverized the batsmen into submission. And take the latest ODI between England and India at Bangalore which was a curtailed 22 over match. The magnificent performance of Zak, Munaf and Ishant in the 3 powerplays was decisive. A new dawn is being quietly ushered in Indian Cricket which I feel will be the best in its history.