A true energizer bunny... Review on Glen McGrath

For eons, the prototype of a fast bowler has been a tall, well built, ripping muscled, frowning, aggressive person who only aim in life is to blast the batsman away. For eons, India has been blaming it's lack of pace bowlers to our diet (veggies only, please), our culture (meek and docile) and so many other factors that a person would actually feel guilty if he thought of ever being a paceman.

Glenn Mcgrath emphatically disproves both the notions!

Here is a paceman who, with an almost mechanical accuracy, actually plays with the minds of the batsman. So what has he got that no one else has?

pace: around 130-135 mph which is what most of the bowlers from India bowl at

swing: none at most times which is again what most of the 'pacemen' from India manage

seam: pretty good seam movement which some of our bowlers too manage to get

So why do batsmen prefer facing say an Agarkar to Mcgrath?

The answer is accuracy. As Preity Zinta says in lakshya ' the key word is 'accuracy''

Like Hrithik managed to discover his 'lakshya' by the end of the movie, we can only hope that some dude bowling at 130mph in some god-forsaken dust bowl with minimal seam movement actually finally discovers this key word somewhere within himself!

Try a simple test : Imagine the best player of your country batting - might be Sachin, Lara, Inzi, Kallis, Trescothick...- and imagine Mcgrath at the other end, beginning his rhythmic runup. At that instant, what are you praying for? that the next ball is dispatched to the boundary? or that the batsman just survives the next ball and the over so that he can feast on the rest of the attack? I would assume the latter.

It is this very quality that distinguishes Mcgrath from the other bowlers.

Add to this, his miserly economy rate and you find that there is hardly any batsman who has consistently dominated him. It also helps greatly that the batsman has only 1 life while a bowler has many more than a cat's 9!

If you would have noticed, the past great decade of this Australian team started with McGrath’s rise in the West Indies. He came in to replace McDermott and ensured that he did more than that! Match after match, series after series, he has been a thorn in the flesh of opening batsmen all around the world. Any doubts? Ask a bloke called Atherton who has the honour of being dismissed by McGrath no less than 19 times! That’s almost the number of innings some batsmen get to play in their entire test career! Shane Warne, himself a great bowler, is the one to have benefited the most from this. An ideal recipe for a batting collapse is to hand over, very early in the morning when the sun is still playing peek-a-boo and the winds are still not tired from moving around, the top 4 batsman to McGrath and then give the deserts to Mr. Warne.

Arguable one of the greatest bowlers to have played with probably the least amount of talent amongst his competitors (think Ambrose, Akram, Waqar, Shoaib, Lee, Donald to name a few), Glenn McGrath is a true great who can teach upcoming bowlers a great deal about bowling ... that is, if they want to learn!