Trent bucks the trend

When Mitchell Johnson fell so far down the pecking order that even James Pattinson was selected ahead of him, he stepped away to change a few things. He began to get fiercer and meaner. He bowled as many bouncers as he was possibly allowed to, and then a few more. He followed through far down the batsman's end. He grew a handlebar moustache.

And he blew England away. Jonathan Trott was gone after the first Test of the 2013-14 Ashes series. Graeme Swann went into retirement two Tests later. Kevin Pietersen was made to walk the plank by the end of the series. England lost players almost as rapidly as they lost Tests. It was Mitchell Johnson's whitewash - Man of the Series by a distance. The terrifying fast bowler was back on top of the world after a few years of, ahem, bowling to the left and right.

Meanwhile, Trent Boult was playing the guitar to Engelbert Humperdinck's music for a roomful of school kids in Rotorua, a small city on New Zealand's North Island. (Take a peek on YouTube; the clip is endearingly sweet.) He was listening to the Eagles and attending Mark Knopfler concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. There is a rumour going, which he recently confirmed in an interview with the New Zealand Herald, that he decided to play rugby instead of football one season. One look at the rugby boys warming up, however, saw Boult pack up his rugby gear and wander right back to the football field.

If he hadn't been such a central figure in New Zealand's cricketing exploits recently, nothing said here would tell you that Boult, like Johnson, is also a fast bowler. A better one, in fact, than the bellicose Australian, if one goes by the ICC Test rankings [third and fifth respectively]. This is because being surly and intimidating is deemed to be as necessary to fast-bowling success as the ability to whiz a bouncer past a batsman's nostrils. Dennis Lillee, Jeff Thompson or Shoaib Akhtar wouldn't be caught dead attending soft rock concerts, let alone being proficient at playing poignant songs on a guitar. (Brett Lee is an exception here, of course.)

Boult is demonstrating, probably unintentionally, the superfluity of the antics that build up that churlish image. If you think he's soft, try fending him off for a spell with the new ball, in either form of cricket. He can find movement in a ball otherwise as reluctant to swing as Paul Collingwood with a Test match to save. His bouncers won't be complemented by an exaggerated follow-through. His wickets won't be celebrated with eye-popping, vein-busting rage, à la Dale Steyn. The only time he might invade your personal space would be to shake your hand on an innings well played. This is a fast bowler, the third best in the world. It bears repeating.

Originally considered a specialist exponent of red-ball cricket, Boult has swiftly risen to become New Zealand's leading ODI bowler, armed with an innocuous smile that belies his hunger and ambition. He bowled twice as many maidens as the second-most prolific in that department at the recently concluded World Cup, a run-fest by any standards. Yet, he did not concede a single run in a staggering 14 of the 75 overs he bowled. This means more than 18% of his overs were maidens. Excellent as it would have been a few decades ago, this is simply superhuman in this era. For me, it is by far the most impressive statistic of the World Cup, better even than AB de Villiers' superlative 162 off 66 balls against the West Indies. De Villiers was swimming with the current, albeit much faster than his contemporaries; Boult was thrashing against it in a tsunami going the other way. He has shown, without doubt, that there are other ways of silencing batsmen than launching streams of invective towards them, or threatening them with a 'broken fu**en arm'.

Last year, Shane Warne, not immune to courting controversy, or cheap publicity for that matter, called Mitchell Starc "soft", saying he needed to be a bit "harder". Boult would make Starc look like an All Black, but there is a wider point here. Starc is now the best ODI bowler in the world, in spite of, and not because of that unfair criticism.

Who can imagine what Boult would be like, or what profession he would have, if he had been born in Australia? If he wasn't playing cricket, it would have been Australia's loss. The reason we don't get too many likeable fast bowlers is they often get the likeability knocked out of them at a young age. There are surely thousands of fast bowlers around the world that we do not see, forever to remain anonymous, because they were forced to cultivate an image they were not comfortable projecting, and which was in any case outrageously irrelevant to their talent. This pseudo-macho fast bowling culture is worthy of paying very close attention to. Boult's success may well nurture many more smiling assassins around the world. They, like Boult, might not spit and snarl, but the new ball in their hand certainly does.