India vs England: How Shane Warne steered Shoaib Bashir, the Rajasthan Royals academy product, on the path to best Rohit Sharma and Ravindra Jadeja

It was a brief conversation with Shane Warne, exactly five years in February 2019, that left an indelible mark on Shoaib Bashir, then just 16.

The young spinner was with the Rajasthan Royal Academy in Somerset, where the late Warne was there to interact with the trainees. Bashir caught his eye and took him aside for a chat. Siddartha Lahiri, head of coaching at RR Academy, remembers the exchange like it was yesterday.

“Are you a spinner or a fast bowler?” asked the former Australian leg-spinner, according to Lahiri. “Spinner,” responded Bashir, who’s an offie.

An incredible day for Shoaib Bashir 🔥

Thank you, @CountyChamp admin 😂

🇮🇳 #INDvENG 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 #EnglandCricket pic.twitter.com/wtDZHGpuza

— England Cricket (@englandcricket) February 24, 2024

“What do you need to do then?” the Aussie quizzed him again. It’s one of those trick questions, Bashir reckoned. “Bowl?”. Warne corrected him, “No, spin the ball. Don’t think of anything else. T20, T10, five-day, four-day, nothing. Just spin the ball.”

It was a lesson Bashir put to good use as he bowled a compact 31-over spell in Ranchi on Saturday to disable the Indian batting at a decisive juncture in the series. In Yashasvi Jaiswal, Shubhman Gill and Ravindra Jadeja, he bested three Indian centurions in the series on Day 2 of the fourth Test.

The signs of his ability had been put on display much before. In Visakhapatnam, Bashir dismissed the Indian skipper Rohit Sharma for his first Test wicket 20 balls into his debut in England’s whites.

Despite it being Bashir’s first Test innings – accompanied by only a dozen first-class outings – it wasn’t his first encounter against a batting great. Making his County Championship debut for Somerset last June, Bashir would hold his end against former England captain Alastair Cook no less, spraying a couple of deliveries that beat the southpaw on the outside edge.

Bashir breaks the crucial partnership between Gill and Jaiswal! 🥲 #INDvENG #IDFCFirstBankTestSeries #BazBowled #JioCinemaSports pic.twitter.com/hCKcWdJq5A

— JioCinema (@JioCinema) February 24, 2024

“What impressed me was that he didn’t bowl that many bad balls,” the Englishman recently told the BBC, furthermore pressing on a trait which would’ve made Warne proud. “He turns the ball really hard.”

The Somerset debutant’s 25-delivery compilation against the former England skipper has become part of the English cricket memorabilia, with captain Ben Stokes having spilt the beans earlier this month that it was how he came across Bashir, foreseeing, “this could be pretty good for India.”

An England Lions camp in November was all the validation that Stokes, head coach Brendon McCullum and managing director Rob Key needed. However, Bashir’s journey to the point of being noticed has been anything but a cakewalk.

Joining the RR academy

Lahiri recalls meeting Bashir for the first time. An 11-year-old boy from Woking, who was extremely shy and introverted. “Friends, girlfriends, parties, there was nothing for Shoaib apart from family and cricket.”

There were two slight bumps in the road though: He was identified as a batter who bowled medium pace, and not featuring in age-group county squads.

The first issue was resolved organically. “By the time he became 13-14, he was quite tall in terms of his age group. He had the height and a natural action. Even bowling medium pace, he had that action where he could bowl offies and release the ball from a height. That’s how spin bowling started for him.”

This is one of the videos that Ben Stokes and the England coaching staff saw of Shoaib Bashir. Brilliant find and a superb addition to the England test match team 🏏 #INDvENG pic.twitter.com/RSk1Y9cMWD

— James (@Surreycricfan) February 24, 2024

The second, Lahiri’s primary task, took more time and attention. Being in a state school in England, the sporting opportunities for Bashir were far and few in between as opposed to his private counterparts. Not making the cut in age-group cricket had left him plagued by self-doubt.

“I wanted to work more on his confidence level, so I made him bowl a lot from the age of 13. He would come from school to the academy, have something to eat, and then get to bowling. A cycle we repeated three-four days a week. He would bowl to his age group, to the senior guys, on 20 yards, 21, 22 … as his age started to come up,” shares Lahiri. “My thought to him was to completely enjoy the game. ‘Just stay consistent with your action and where you land the ball’. He came in and he bowled, and bowled, and bowled.”

Being in a state school had a silver lining after all. Lahiri says: “It allowed him to start playing adult cricket because there wasn’t any sport for him at school. On Saturdays, he would play fourth division, like four-eleven, third-eleven cricket but with seniors from a very early age at 13-14. That’s where his progression began.”

‘Rock bottom’ of his career

Just as Bashir was coming up the ranks in Surrey cricket, he was dealt with another googly when the county did not offer him a contract at the age of 16 – generally seen as a deal breaker for a player in England.

For a boy who’d been on the Surrey pathway since the age of nine, it was a blow on a personal level as well. “When I got released. It was probably the rock bottom of my career,” he’d admit on BBC Radio Somerset recently. “I didn’t think I’d be playing at any kind of level at that point.”

But still unwilling to give up on his dream of becoming a pro-cricketer, Bashir then turned to the Berkshire Under-18s. And it was while playing for them in the summer of 2022, that the off-spinner snapped a 5-fer against Somerset’s junior side, leading to a trial with the Somerset B team. It kickstarted a chain of events that got offie on the flight to India.

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