Mohammed Siraj: England’s tormentor who’s driven by love for country and a hunger to bowl

ON THE eve of the final Test against England, Mohammed Siraj was given a choice: he didn’t have to play if he didn’t want to. The team management was worried about his body; he had bowled a whopping 145 overs by then and even though Jasprit Bumrah wasn’t available for the final game, they did not wish to push Siraj. Siraj, however, was clear that he would play. He would eventually bowl with his entire being to take India to a famous series-levelling win, picking up nine wickets in the Test and finishing the series with 23 wickets — the highest by a bowler from either side.

He has made far more difficult choices in his career than he had in that final game. During the 2020-21 series in Australia, played during the pandemic, he had received word that his abba — his father who meant everything to him, who had supported his love for cricket by driving autos through Hyderabad’s nights — was dead. He had a word with his mother, who reminded him that all his father wished for in his life was for him to play and make the nation proud — and so he should play on.

Bharat Arun, India’s bowling coach then and the man Siraj has publicly called “farishta (angel)” for the mentorship role he has played in the cricketer’s life, recalls how Siraj was grappling with this emotional upheaval on his own in his hotel room.

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“It was Covid time and protocols were in place. Here was this 25-26-year-old boy, on his own. None of us were allowed to visit him. Only the manager could do so — that was the protocol. I spoke to him on a WhatsApp video call. He was in tears but when I asked him if he wished to go back home, he said ‘no sir, mein khelega’. I couldn’t even go hug him, offer some real emotional support… The team gently suggested to him that if he wishes, he doesn’t have to come to practice the next day, but in my mind I was hoping he would come. Not for the training per se, but just that he would be with us, with his friends in the team. He is such a popular figure, loved by all… and here he was, struggling on his own.”

Siraj turned up the following day, tried his best to hold himself together, and hurled that little round red ball with emotional fury at the nets.

It was in another nets, years ago in 2017, that Siraj’s career would change. He wasn’t yet the Miyan that the cricketing world knows now; he was a nobody. He had played just one Ranji game before being dropped in the previous season, but by chance, he was there on that fateful day to bowl in the nets in Hyderabad for the visiting IPL team, Royal Challengers Bengaluru (RCB).

“I remember bowling bouncers at K L Rahul, who asked me, ‘do you bowl only bouncers’,” Siraj had laughingly recalled in an RCB video much later. Bharat picks up the story. “Not just Rahul, he bounced at Virat Kohli also, apart from troubling all the batsmen with his regular stuff. I was impressed with this young boy’s personality and skill. So I enquired from VVS Laxman about him.”

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Laxman didn’t know himself, and that could still have been the end of the road.

Luckily for Siraj, Bharat would soon come to Hyderabad as the state team’s Ranji Trophy coach. “I saw the 20 players selected for my first camp and didn’t see him. I didn’t even remember his name. So I asked the local association to send me the net bowlers who featured in the RCB nets. And when they came, I recognised Siraj. I immediately said he has to be in my team — that’s how our association began. During that year, when he became the highest wicket-taker for Hyderabad that season, I got to know him, his background, his struggles.”

At the end of that 2020-21 Australian series, Siraj went straight to his father’s grave to pay his respects.

‘Anything for the country’

Siraj stares down England’s premier batsman Joe Root after yet another LBW appeal has died in his throat. All through the series, he has been hustling and harassing the batsmen with his skill, his indefatigable energy, and his willingness for the fight.

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Mohammed Siraj, left, celebrates the dismissal of Ben Duckett, right, during the fourth day of the third cricket Test between England and India at Lord’s cricket ground in London. (AP Photo) Mohammed Siraj, left, celebrates the dismissal of Ben Duckett, right, during the fourth day of the third cricket Test between England and India at Lord’s cricket ground in London. (AP Photo)

Ben Stokes, England’s captain, would hail him as a “warrior”, Root would say he is “someone you want on your team”. Root would also observe that Siraj’s stares and verbals are part of a “fake anger”. “He has got this fake anger about him sometimes, which I can see straight through. You can tell he is actually a really nice lad. But he tries incredibly hard. He is a very skilful player,” he says.

That “fake anger” is how Siraj motivates himself. In Australia, during a Test series that lasted from November 2024 to January this year, he was booed relentlessly by the Australian crowd after he was involved in a heated exchange with home hero Travis Head. From that point on, he was the target of the crowd’s ire across cities. “He wasn’t bothered, was he?” Bharat says. “That’s his temperament. Very strong-minded, he will push himself to do anything for the team and for the country.”

At times, with others, the “do-it-for-the-country” vibe can come across as a bit forced, a cliche. Not with Siraj. “It’s naturally ingrained in him. Perhaps, it came from his father,” says Bharat. Siraj has often spoken about how his father would always support his cricket and keep saying to everyone that one day, his son will shine and with that, “desh ka naam roshan karega”.

Siraj’s mother was the pragmatic one. She worked as a cook and cleaned others’ homes and wanted Siraj to follow her elder son’s route out of poverty and their small, rented house. But that was not to be — her elder son became an engineer, while Siraj, a “backbencher” by his own admission, was more interested in cricket. Scoldings and occasional beatings followed, but she couldn’t wean Siraj away from cricket. There is a story that Siraj narrates in the RCB video, about how he once told her, “Ek din aisa aayenga paise rakhne jagah nahi rahenga aapke paas (a day will come when so much money would pour in that you won’t have a place to store it)”.

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Mohammed Siraj’s old home in Hyderabad. (Special arrangement) Mohammed Siraj’s old home in Hyderabad. (Special arrangement)

Sure enough, the IPL sign-up happened and Siraj requested his father to stop plying his auto. In the years to come, he built a multi-storeyed home for his parents.

The new house that Mohammed Siraj build in Hyderabad. (Special arrangement) The new house that Mohammed Siraj build in Hyderabad. (Special arrangement)

As a teenager, Siraj played his cricket on a dust-bowl of a ground in a neighbourhood of Old Hyderabad. Dust would swirl around the entrance of the Eidgah Maidan where a tomb of a 19th-century saint, a miracle-healer, stands. Residents believe the saint’s ghost roams around at night, snatching goats and chickens in the neighbourhood, though the debris around the tomb these days isn’t bones, but cigarette butts.

The dust bowl in Old Hyderabad where Mohammed Siraj played with friends. (Special arrangement) The dust bowl in Old Hyderabad where Mohammed Siraj played with friends. (Special arrangement)

It’s here, on a cricket pitch cobbled together with loose black soil, seemingly designed to kill the bounce of tennis balls, that Siraj bowled endlessly. “He somehow managed things that others did not,” Siraj’s close friend Mohammed Shafi once told The Indian Express. “He used to bowl all the time, and when a variation caught his imagination, he would practise it until he mastered it.”

It’s a sentiment that Bharat agrees with wholeheartedly. “I don’t know how much of it was because of the relationship we shared, but you introduce him to a trick and he devotes himself to trying it without any question. He would be at it for hours for days together till he mastered it.”

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Like that scrambled-seam ball he weaponised against England in this series.

The scrambled-seam ball

On flat, batting-friendly pitches designed for England’s aggressive batting approach, Siraj had realised he needed something other than conventional deliveries. It was a ball that Bharat had introduced to him on an earlier tour of England, inspired by what he saw of England’s then premier bowlers James Anderson and Stuart Broad.

“The close-ups revealed that they would have their fingers on the leather of the ball, as opposed to the conventional way of gripping behind the seam of the ball. With that grip, if you release the ball, it would go all scrambled across in the air, and if it lands on the seam, it could move around. Siraj was besotted with it.”

In this series in England, he hit a perfect balance. Time and again, he set up batsmen with scrambled-seam balls that would nip back sharply into them. But he would also slip in the conventional fingers-behind-the-seam curve balls that would either move away or hold their line. Or take the conventional route first before punctuating it with the scrambled-seam stuff. In the end, the mix-match of this deadly combo proved too much for England’s batsmen.

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Everything that precedes the moment when he hurls the ball across is quite a sight for the batsmen. He bounds in, energy dripping off his run, his visage, and then, as he gathers himself near the stumps, his face grimaces into this intense expression, his arms flail about, and he hurls himself into an open-chested release. The bowling arm can get all crooked above the elbow, twisted at an angle. It hangs in there almost, bio-mechanically loose, pliant to release the ball from weird angles. There is no apparent template that a batsman, used to bowlers with more conventional actions, can crack.

Even if nothing dramatic happens with the ball post-release, his manic energy, from the run-up to the follow-through, suggests something is happening. And he is relentless. Ball after ball, spell after spell, he is at the batsmen’s soul almost. He bowled one of his fastest ball of the series, a 90 miles per hour screamer, right near the end, on that fateful morning at The Oval on the final day of the Test series. His final ball, the yorker that sealed England’s fate, was his fifth-fastest ball of the series.

“His energy is quite something. It comes from a deep place in his soul,” says Bharat. “Yes, he is blessed with a good strong body, and has a nice action that doesn’t put undue stress, but he is a man who is immensely inspired by playing Test cricket for India. There is a very deep love for the game. It’s all he knows.”

One final story then, one for the road, to understand Siraj.

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Just before an Under-23 state tournament in Hyderabad, he had been hit by dengue and was feeling totally enervated. The coach thought the youngster was making excuses not to be present for practice and gave him an ultimatum that he won’t be selected if he didn’t turn up.

Siraj yanked off the remnants of a glucose drip taken that morning, left the hospital, and somehow found the energy to bowl that day — and was selected. He returned to the hospital. Now, he has performed in front of adoring crowds in England and returned to a rousing reception in his city. “He won’t get carried away at all, he is a grounded person and knows how these things work,” says Bharat.

Siraj does understand. On the RCB podcast, he had recalled MS Dhoni’s advice to him: “When I was selected for India, Mahi bhai told me, ‘When you are performing, the entire world will be with you, and when you don’t, they will abuse you.’ Siraj then cued up the abuses he received after a bad patch in the IPL. “Kitne comments… tu cricket chhod dey, jaake apne baap ke saath auto chala (Quit cricket, go drive an auto with your father)’. And today, those same people say, ‘you are the best bowler, yeh-woh… mereko chahiye nahi bhai tum logon ka (I don’t need your praises).”

Siraj bowls because he loves to bowl, the rest is mere detail.

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