With four wickets on D-Day, Umesh Yadav paces it just right

The memories of Mohali came flooding back on an overcast Sunday at the Rajiv Gandhi International stadium at Uppal when Umesh Yadav produced that ball, twice, back-to-back, to remove opener Kusal Perera and Kumar Sangakkara.

“I was holding back just a little bit because what happens sometimes with bowling outright fast is that it ends up either at the batsman’s feet or too short,” Yadav said later. “So I thought since the conditions are favourable and the wicket is helping, why not try and hit the right length and let the ball do the rest.”

Keeping it simple

He did. And thepitch, hard and bouncy, did the rest. A breeze blew gently across when Yadav ran in to bowl the first over. He began with a delivery that shaped away from the left-handed Perera, proceeded to bowl a wide and a short one that was pulled for four. There was swing and speed, but little evidence of control so far. Then, off the last ball of the over, it all came together.

Yadav sent down a 140 kmph scorcher short of a length and just outside leg. It jinked in upon pitching and opened up Perera, taking a faint edge to the ‘keeper. Perera, 24, is young, relatively inexperienced and out-of-form. But those weren’t the reasons that got him out. The ball did.

Kumar Sangakkara is 37, relatively in-form as he made a half-century in the last match, and with nearly 13000 ODI runs, a giant of the game. He suffered the same fate nevertheless, in an almost identical fashion off the very first ball that he faced.

It was the second time in the series that Yadav, who has bowled at an unsettling pace, accounted for these two men. In the last match at Motera too, he removed Perera with a 90-mph delivery that pitched at leg-stump and straightened, trapping the batsman in front. Sangakkara’s wicket was a lucky one, coming as it did off a full-toss.

But skill, not luck, was what favored the pacer in the third ODI on Sunday. Yadav went on to take two more wickets with the older ball later, though not as spectacularly. So, when the selection committee sits to pick the team for Australia on Monday, they will be likely to remember that fiery spell and those twin Yohannan-esque dismissals, and not the fact that he took quite a smacking from centurion Mahela Jayawardene in the end.