When you think about fast bowling, you immediately tend to
think about the bowlers from West Indies from the 70’s and 80’s-the Holding’s,
the Garner’s, the Roberts’s and the Marshall’s and so on. And to that list, also
add the names of the Lillie’s and the Thomson’s and you would quickly realize
that it was perhaps the most decorated era of fast bowling. And when I mean
fast, it’s uncomfortably fast. The art of fast bowling is all about
intimidating the batsmen, inducing fear into their mind and when a batsman
tries to think about protecting himself from the ball rather than focusing on
the next ball, a fast bowler has won more than half the battle. But, as the
time passed by and as the game started becoming more and more batsmen friendly,
the weapon of fast bowling and the art of intimidation started to vanish. We
had the likes of Donald, Wasim, Waqar, Brett Lee in late 90’s and early
2000’s but by the end of first decade of 21st century, fast bowling
almost became extinct. Due to excessive workload and constant cricket, even the
bowlers themselves started to cut down on pace and concentrate on line and
length, but, what all this did was not only left the batsmen with less
challenging situations but also to cricket fan, made the experience of viewing
the game, especially the Test Cricket, inferior. It’s quite absorbing and
engrossing to watch a tear-away fast bowler unleashing his pace and
intimidating the batsman in a Test match, perhaps quite a rare commodity these
days.
It was the Australian summer of
2013-14 and England were touring down under for an Ashes series. England lost
the Ashes 5-0, but they did not lose to Australia, they lost to a man called as
Mitchell Johnson. Gabba, Adelaide Oval, WACA, MCG, SCG, Test match after Test
match, English were tormented by the lethal pace of Johnson. Johnson induced
fear into the minds of English batsmen, bamboozled them with serious pace and
made them dance to his tunes. His short ball stuff was nasty, thunderbolts
bowled at 145 clicks and above whistled past the noses of Englishmen. His pace
and aggression was too much for the English. And it all started at Gabba, where
Johnson took 9 wickets in the Test match, 4 in first and 5 in second innings. But
it was more to it than just wickets, Johnson’s uncomfortably quick spell of
fast bowling was now England’s psychological problem more than a technical one,
as they were just not mentally prepared to face it. Jonathon Trott’s exit from
the tour just after the first Test citing mental illness was the last thing
England wanted and it surely had to do a lot with him being peppered with nasty
short-ball stuff from Mitch. From Gabba to Adelaide, Mitch just got better and
better and perhaps bowled the most hostile spell in recent times on the flat
deck at the Adelaide Oval. His ball to Cook in the evening session on Day 2,
that shaped away just at the last moment, bowled at 148 clicks to castle the
timber was simply unplayable. And on day 3, on a hot Saturday afternoon, just
after lunch, we saw the very best of Mitchell Johnson. Johnson was steaming in,
bowling pace like fire and blew England away with match-winning figures of 7/40.
Johnson to Broad and Mark Nicholas’s words “the crowds are with Johnson, this
is like the days of Lillie’s and Thomson’s, in comes Mitchell Johnson” still
reverberate in my ears and the whole atmosphere around the Oval was magical, fast
bowling at its very, very best. Johnson continued tormenting England and picked
up his third five-wicket haul of the series at the MCG in the boxing-day Test
match. Johnson’s spell with the second new ball late in the day on boxing-day
was lethal and Bairstow and Bresnan, in particular, had no clue whatsoever what
they were up against. By the time the Ashes series ended, Johnson had finished
with 37 wickets in the series and had broken down the fulcrum of English
batting line-up.
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| Johnson returned with 37 wickets in Ashes series down under in 2013 |
After making the mockery of England’s Ashes campaign,
Mitchell Johnson yet again in his moustache look was fit and ready for team
Australia’s next Test campaign, the tour to rainbow nation in February-March
2014. In the first Test at Centurion, on Day 2, Mitchell Johnson set the tone for
Australia with a spell that wrecked havoc. The deliveries, especially to
Skipper Smith and Du Plessis, bowled at 150 clicks were uncomfortably quick.
The one to Du Plessis was a lethal back of a length delivery that was directed
near to his rib-cage and there was hardly anything that he could do about it.
Johnson in the first innings bounced out Smith, Du Plessis, Robin Peterson and
Morkel to finish off with superlative figures of 7/68. He backed it up with
another five wicket-haul in the second innings to hand Australia a
comprehensive 281-run victory. Now those 12 wickets that Johnson bagged weren’t
just wickets, those were speed-breakers, confidence-crushers, mental
block-holes in South Africa’s pursuit of home series victory against Australia
that evaded them since 1969/70. Johnson in that first Test got rid of skipper
Smith twice, bounced out the tail and his ferocious bouncer to Ryan McLaren
that hit him on his head was enough to keep him out for the remainder of the
series, in fact, for the entire domestic summer. After a bit of a wobble in the
second Test, Australia came back to win the third Test with Australia’s bowling
department being spearheaded by who else other than Mitchell Johnson as he
picked up 7 wickets in the match and finished up with 22 wickets in the series.
Now those 8 Test matches (5 Vs Eng and 3 Vs Sa) were by far
the golden Test matches of Mitchell Johnson’s career. He picked up as many as 59
wickets in those 8 Test matches and various spells that he bowled across those
8 Tests were kind of spells every child who wants to become a fast bowler would
imagine. It was like a dream and perhaps the most hostile, lethal and tear-away
spells of fast bowling of this decade so far.
Now in the time before and after those 8 Tests, Mitch was
already good, could vanquish his opposition with serious pace on his given day,
like the spells at Perth against South Africa and England in 2008 and 2010
respectively, but was inconsistent and his performances swung from being
exemplary on one day to being preposterous on the other. But, those 8 Tests and
those 59 wickets certainly made him immortal in the department of fast bowling.
Johnson retired from all forms of International cricket in
November 2015 at the age of 34 and left the cricketing community in a bit of a
dazzle. Everyone would have wished may be he could have played for a little
longer, but we have to respect the big man’s decision and just cherish some of
the fine, fine spells of hostile fast bowling that Mitchell Johnson has
produced.
