Why Adil Rashid will be India’s toughest challenge in T20 world cup semifinal
Adil Rashid is England’s genial showstopper with the ball. He may not hog the wicket-taking charts with clumps of dismissals, but the wily leg-spinner almost always turns up and turns it square to seize moments that eventually frame an England win.
Rashid has snapped up 116 T20I wickets since 2015, the most for an English bowler and the third-highest among all spinners.
This T20 World Cup too, Rashid Khan (14) and Adam Zampa (13), the ‘wicket-taking’ leggies are comfortably ahead of Rashid (nine) on the leaderboard. However, the 36-year-old signs up for the big moments, producing that game-changing wicket or sending back the key aggressor.
As observed by former England captain and pundit Nasser Hussain in his recent column on Daily Mail, “(Rashid) is one of the few modern wrist spinners - rivals Rashid Khan and Adam Zampa like to bowl into the pitch - who will toss the ball up, even on these smaller grounds.”
Hussain also complimented the variations in Rashid’s arsenal during the World Cup, calling it the best he’s ever seen from the leggie. It may be the years in his profile or simply the fact that the Caribbean has always been a favoured hunting ground for him – 30 wickets at a 14.83 average and an exceptional 6.09 economy – his best T20I returns across any continent.
Magic in the air
While the Afghanistan captain Rashid Khan and Zampa are bowlers who have moved on to make better use of the strip to prize out the batters, Rashid has stayed true to the might of his high-arm release, snappy pace in the action and the prodigious turn that it brings.
Rashid invites the big hits, the slog-sweeps from the Andre Russells and Glenn Maxwells, and yet holds them off with the direction of drift and turn as the ball pitches higher up on the full. The variations in the air make him a standout.
In England’s final Super 8 contest, he boldly tossed the ball up to Aaron Jones, the USA batter who had lit up the tournament with his slog-swept sixes. Jones was spot on in his initial movement to line up for a slog towards mid-wicket. But as the ball drifted, slid and spun across sharply, Jones’ plans were made to look foolhardy. The ball swooshed into the stumps and Rashid would pull off an encore of the dismissal against Nitish Kumar.
Even as his high-arm action can offer a glimpse of the impending wrong’un, Rashid weaves so many unpredictable movements into one ball that the batter is caught between a probable leg-break, top-spinner or the incoming delivery.
The googly has bagged him five wickets - four of them bowled. The leg-break has earned him four, with one bowled dismissal. The exceptions in both cases make for a better understanding of Rashid’s craft.
In England’s seven-run defeat to South Africa, Rashid controlled the middle overs with 1/20 in four overs, finishing as the most economical bowler in the game. Rashid’s solitary wicket was a dragged-on bowled dismissal of South Africa skipper Aiden Markram. He looped it up as much as possible, offering Markram the perception of nothing more than an inviting, overpitched delivery. Instead, the white Kookaburra’s deft side-spin from outside the off-stump was past Markram’s reading as he got an inside edged an attempted cover drive back onto the wickets. Virat Kohli would not have forgotten a pronounced version of the same delivery from 2018 in Leeds when a side-spinning ball from Rashid pitched on leg and progressed to clatter the off-stump.
In the previous outing against the West Indies in St Lucia, Rashid offered the six-hitting bulwark Russell a fuller delivery of his liking. The vast square boundaries at the venue handed some extra leeway. The impulsive slog-sweeper in Russell kicked on but failed to muscle the ball past wide long-on as the massive inward spin off the googly cast his downfall. Both deliveries - to Markram and Russell - held marginal differences in terms of the line but completed contrasting trajectories as they compelled the batters to trust their instincts.
It is this subtlety that bloomed late during the 2022 World Cup campaign to champion England to the title. After picking up a solitary wicket in four Super 10 outings, Rashid headlined the semifinal against India by strangling Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli before foxing the marauding Suryakumar Yadav with a deceptive, dipping leg-break delivery. He bagged two in the final against Pakistan, dismissing Mohammed Haris with his first ball before constricting Babar Azam with a sharp-spinning googly that sprang from length to induce a caught-and-bowled opportunity.
Rashid may not have turned heads as yet, but the leg-spinner might bring the most deceptive four-over concoction to thwart India once again at the same hurdle in Guyana.
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