When MS Dhoni swung his bat to a score a six and deliver India’s second ICC Cricket World Cup title at Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium in 2011, more than 700km (434 miles) away in Hyderabad, a 16-year-old Mohammed Siraj was cultivating his dream of playing for India.

On Wednesday, the 29-year-old will steam in with the ball in his hand as the world’s top one-day international (ODI) bowler when India take on New Zealand in the 2023 tournament’s first semifinal at the same storied venue.

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The tall and athletic pacer from Hyderabad in southern India has come a long way from bowling in slippers on dusty grounds to becoming a household name in the cricket-obsessed country.

In September, he took five Sri Lankan wickets in 16 balls – the joint fastest five-wicket haul in ODI history – and ended with figures of 6-21 as India romped to a 10-wicket win in the Asia Cup final.

Siraj’s performance left his captain, Rohit Sharma, befuddled as he spoke about the fast bowler after the match.

“It was Siraj’s day to be a hero, and he stood up for the team,” Rohit said, heaping praise on the right-arm quick, who bowled a seven-over opening spell, which also saw him run all the way down the long-on boundary to field off his own bowling.

“He wanted to keep going. I wanted him to keep going, but our trainer asked him to stop to maintain his fitness [for the World Cup].”

Come the World Cup and its biggest group-stage match between India and Pakistan, Siraj stood up for his team once more. He dismissed Pakistan’s in-form batter Abdullah Shafique to break the opening stand and followed up with the prize wicket of their star captain, Babar Azam.

‘You need money to buy shoes’

Lovingly nicknamed “Miya Bhai” (sir, brother) by his Indian teammates, Siraj first picked up the game as a teenager. He would skip lessons in school and then in college to go play cricket on the dusty expanse of the Eidgah (Eid prayer venue) ground in Hyderabad.

“It would be jam-packed with at least 15 matches taking place at the same time,” Siraj said during a podcast with his Indian Premier League (IPL) team Royal Challengers Bangalore.

His father, Mohammed Ghous, drove an auto rickshaw all day, and his mother, Shabana Begum, worked as a cleaner and cook in the neighbourhood.

Siraj’s love for the game often landed him in trouble with his mother, but Ghous always backed his son’s ambition. The teenager’s first taste of competitive cricket came with his uncle’s club team.

“I took nine wickets in my first ever club match and played in the local league for four years,” Siraj told Indian sports journalist Gaurav Kapoor in an interview.

The teenaged Siraj would play in slippers because his daily pocket money of 70 rupees (less than $1) was not enough to buy sports shoes.

“I bowled in slippers until I was 19. You need money to buy shoes, and I didn’t have any. Had I asked my parents to buy me shoes, they would have probably thrashed me with a pair,” he joked.

‘I only knew how to bowl fast’

The cricket-mad teenager had been bowling with a tennis ball until he was selected by a local club that offered to pay for his services in addition to offering a cricket kit and a pair of spikes.

Siraj’s eyes lit up when he saw the shoes but “didn’t know why they had nails sticking out at the bottom”.

“They handed me the new ball right away – it was my first time holding a proper cricket ball – and I didn’t know what to do with the seam. I only knew how to run in and bowl fast, so I did.”

Siraj took five wickets in his first match as he left the opposition beaten by his pace.

Of his 70-rupee pocket money, 40 now went towards fuelling up his trusty old motorcycle that needed a long run-up to get going, much like the fast bowler himself.

“Once I was playing regular cricket, I used to go to the local ground on my bike while the other players arrived in big cars, and I would feel so ashamed of having to push-start my bike that I waited for every one to leave before making my way home,” he said.

Once Siraj had figured out what to do with the ball’s seam, how to bowl in and out swing, he was knocking on the doors of regional teams.

“When I was named amongst the under-23 probables, I got struck by dengue fever and could feel the opportunity slip away,” he recalled.

Determined not to let his chance go, Siraj turned up for practice on his dad’s auto rickshaw and participated in the full session out of sheer passion for the game.

Special connection with Virat Kohli

Siraj’s under-23 exploits brought him a chance to bowl in the nets to the country’s stars during IPL practice sessions.

“I pelted KL Rahul with so many bouncers that he got mad at me and asked me if I knew how to bowl anything else,” Siraj said.

But it wasn’t only Rahul who saw him that day. Siraj had caught the eye of bowling coach Bharat Arun, who later worked with India’s national team, and he picked the lanky pacer in Hyderabad’s squad for Ranji Trophy – India’s premier domestic tournament – in 2015.

Siraj knew his career was on an upwards trajectory, but something kept bothering him.

“I wanted to make enough money to put my parents at ease,” he said.

That money came two years later when he was picked in the 2016 IPL auction for 26 million rupees ($312,200) by the Hyderabad franchise.

“When I left home to join the [IPL] team, I told my brother to find a house for our family by the time I was back.”

Siraj moved to star batter and then-India captain Virat Kohli’s RCB team a year later.

He loves to tell the story of hosting his star-studded, Kohli-led IPL team at his new home in Hyderabad.

“Virat Bhai told me he couldn’t make it to the dinner because of a stiff back, and we are all heartbroken, but in fact he wanted to surprise me and my family. It’s the best surprise any one has ever given me.”

‘From there to here’

During his tenure as India’s all-format captain, Kohli showed a special liking to out-and-out fast bowlers because they matched his aggressive approach towards the game.

In Siraj, Kohli had found one such cog in the wheel.

The bowler, who is a self-confessed Kohli fan, added a new threat to India’s bowling attack and took a five-wicket haul on an emotional first Test series in Australia.

Ghous passed away while the Indian team was under quarantine prior to the series, and Siraj’s family urged him to stay in Australia to fulfill his biggest supporter’s lifelong dream.

When Siraj lined up with his teammates for India’s national anthem before his first Test match, tears rolled down his face.

“I had finally fulfilled dad’s dream, but he wasn’t around to see it,” he would say after the match.

“It also made me realise how far I had come. ‘Kahan thay, kahan agaye’ [From there to here].”

Siraj, now a regular name on the Indian teamsheet, has bagged 12 wickets in the World Cup so far and will be raring to go against a strong New Zealand batting lineup.

When he lines up to represent India in his 40th and most important ODI match at the Indian home of cricket on Wednesday, Siraj will be hundreds of kilometres and 14 strife-filled years away from the dusty, small-town and village grounds of his childhood.

Source: Al Jazeera

Mumbai, India –  As the Indian cricket team move from city to city like a travelling carnival, steamrollering all opposition in a home World Cup, they are cheered on by packed stadiums of fans in replica blue jerseys, many bearing “Virat 18” on their backs.

Meanwhile, Virat Kohli, India’s star batter, is having the time of his life.

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Kohli has regaled fans with his batting. And when the DJ spins the right tune, he’s also not shy to show off his song-appropriate dance moves, some of them picturised on his wife Anushka Sharma, a famous Bollywood actor and producer.

At times the crowds have chanted for Kohli to be given a chance to bowl, and against Netherlands on Sunday night, he did.

The “wrong-footed, in-swinging menace” – as described by his coach Rahul Dravid – obliged by taking a wicket from a dreadful delivery and enjoying every last bit of it with his teammates, fans and wife Anushka who cheered him on from the stands.

Kohli’s World (Cup)

Amid all this, Kohli ended the league phase as the leading run scorer in the tournament, with 594 runs, getting 50 or more in all but two of nine matches.

On occasion, he has strategised with his batting partners to complete his century before the win was sealed. In the shadow of the Western Ghats in Pune, they successfully engineered a hundred for him against Bangladesh. Under the snow-capped peaks in Dharamshala against New Zealand, they fell short by five runs.

In steamy Kolkata on November 5, the entire stadium sang him happy birthday. Kohli, who turned 35 that day, scored a hundred in India’s victory over South Africa, and in the process, he equalled his hero Sachin Tendulkar’s record of 49 one-day international centuries.

When India last won the World Cup, in 2011, Kohli was 23.

During the celebratory lap around the field in Mumbai that night, he famously hoisted Tendulkar on his shoulders and supplied a memorable quote to the cameras: “He’s carried the burden of the nation for 21 years, so it’s time we carry him on our shoulders.”

If India go on to win this World Cup, it is not out of the question for Kohli to be the one hoisted in Ahmedabad.

In the 12 years between then and now, he has acquired a status that few in the sport ever have. To the outside world Kohli is an icon for Indian cricket.

Within India he has come to represent something greater: excellence itself.

‘Hot-bloodedness and internal discipline’

There are, first of all, the runs: a staggering 26,000-plus and counting in international cricket, already the fourth highest of all time.

There is the legacy of his captaincy (which ended, under controversial circumstances, in 2022). Although India did not land a global trophy in that time, his 63 percent win record across formats compares with the best in history. During his captaincy, the Test team held the number one ranking for three-and-a-half years straight.

But to understand the phenomenon of Kohli in contemporary India, we have to consider, too, the impact of “Brand Kohli”.

For four of the past five years he has been placed first in Kroll’s Celebrity Brand Valuation reports for Indian celebrities, ahead of a bevvy of film actors (his latest valuation is $177m).

No fewer than 372 million people subscribe to his social media feeds. If put together, an agglomeration of Kohli followers would make the third biggest country in the world.

While welcoming cricket into the Olympics, the LA Games Sports Director Niccolo Campriani pointed out that Kohli’s following is “more than LeBron James, Tom Brady and Tiger Woods combined”.

Santosh Desai, a leading Indian advertising professional and columnist, teased out the elements of “Brand Kohli” for Al Jazeera: “There is grit, a kind of fierce determination”; “a combination of hot-bloodedness and internal discipline”; “a certain hardness and masculinity”; “aggression is an important part, directed both at himself and outside”.

If these adjectives feel at odds with his carefree demeanour on display at the World Cup, there is reason.

Age, fatherhood, freedom from captaincy, have all had a (slightly) mellowing effect on the most relentlessly intense figure Indian cricket has known, whose in-your-face competitiveness – celebrations like road rage – could rub not just the opposition the wrong way but some of his own countrymen too.

Desai says there has been brand evolution since his marriage to Anushka: “a definite attempt to dull some of the harder edges of his persona”.

Indeed Kohli has often credited Anushka with having a calming influence on his life.

“The patience bit I have learnt ever since me and Anushka met each other – I was very impatient before,” Kohli famously said during an online session with students during the coronavirus pandemic.

‘He’s a winner’

Indian viewers often receive Kohli in carefully curated ways, especially on Star Sports, the broadcasters of the 2023 World Cup.

Kohli-specific programming has been a staple during their tournament coverage.

The WeForVirat series documents aspects of his life and career.

Believe: The Diwali Miracle, a two-part series, is dedicated to a single T20 innings against Pakistan.

In Wrogn Lessons (Wrogn is a clothing brand Kohli co-owns), Kohli reveals his intimate side as he talks about his mum and daughter.

Whereas on the chat show Virat Unplugged, he winsomely banters with a social media influencer.

It’s not all adulation. Unexpected blowback came this weekend, when a leading trend on X in India attacked Star Sports for being a “PR agency” for Kohli, and more specifically, for not giving play to the captain and fellow batting stalwart, Rohit Sharma.

It was a storm in a teacup. Worldly success – fame that is easily worn; wealth that is directed into such business investments as a plant-based meats company, a gymnasium chain, the football club Goa FC – only burnishes Kohli’s credentials as a sporting superachiever.

Former England captain Nasser Hussain once asked Duncan Fletcher, who had coached both England and India, for his take on Kohli.

“He’s a winner,” was Fletcher’s pithy response. It is what a young, aspirational nation looks up to.

‘Changed the way the sport is played’

The most visible proof of Kohli’s ambition has been his pursuit of supreme fitness.

“Visionary,” is the word of choice for Basu Shanker, head strength-and-conditioning coach of Kohli’s IPL team, and of the Indian team during Kohli’s captaincy.

“He was and is ahead of his time,” Basu told Al Jazeera. “He started preparing himself like an Olympic athlete – with such diligence that it was a game-changer.”

Basu is being modest. It was he who introduced Kohli, in 2015, to programmes whose effect Kohli once likened to someone putting “high-octane fuel in my body”. In their minds, Kohli and Basu were not competing with cricketers: they were aiming for Novak Djokovic. It is hardly surprising that Kohli, a football fan, idolises not Lionel Messi but Cristiano Ronaldo.

The turning point for Kohli had come even earlier though, in 2012.

“I was finishing candy packets, 40 pieces, three packets a week. I was eating and sleeping horribly, my habits were all over the place,” he recalled once in an interview to Sky Sports. “I finished the IPL, I remember I went home, came out of the shower, saw myself in the mirror and I was ashamed.”

Kohli’s self-control since is the stuff of legend. A former support staff member of the Indian team recalls the time at breakfast when a dosa was served to him. Kohli leaned over, sniffed it, remarked that it smelled great, and returned to his optimally calibrated plate.

“It mustn’t be easy for you,” said the colleague.

“Who said playing for India is easy?” Kohli replied.

Ordinarily, cricketers have a cheat meal a week. Kohli has one a year, sometimes two years.

Watching him in sporting middle-age sprint his runs towards a fag end of an innings, in a World Cup where batters keep going down with cramps, is to think of other Kohli stories.

Getting a travelling yoga instructor to stretch him on match days at an hour when his teammates are still asleep; showing up at the gym late in the evening, to the astonishment of opposition coaches, after he’s scored a big century in sapping conditions and played football with the team afterwards.

The effects of Kohli’s obsession have been transformational not only for himself, they have influenced athletic culture in India.

“Now every kid in this country knows that fitness is the vehicle on which you travel for excellence,” Basu said. “He changed the way the sport is played.”

To Desai, Kohli’s metamorphosis goes beyond sport.

“It is a very powerful symbol of what is possible.”

Source: Al Jazeera

The group stage at the 2023 Cricket World Cup has concluded and we know the four semifinalists that will compete for the trophy in India.

Hosts India – alongside Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – will now battle for the crown of world champions.

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The tournament started on October 5 with the two previous finalists going head-to-head and New Zealand exacting swift revenge on England for the defeat in the 2019 final.

Here are five key takeaways from the last six weeks.

1. India are clear favourites

India stormed the group stage of the 2023 World Cup, and a perfect record of nine wins in nine matches has been just reward for their performances.

The hosts have set the standard for which the three other semifinalists must aspire if anyone is to stop Rohit Sharma from lifting the trophy.

The highlight with the ball was bowling out Sri Lanka for 55 – the lowest total by a Test nation at a World Cup. Mohammed Shami took five wickets in the 302-run win in Mumbai.

To pick a highlight with the bat would be akin to choosing your favourite child.

Perhaps it was against Australia, and all odds, when India were three down with two runs on the board while in pursuit of 200.

Sharma was one of the three to go, but the two left in the middle, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul, were calm and composed – and in the end magnificent.

It was this six-wicket win in Chennai that said: the rest are in trouble.

2. Kohli is king

Individually, there was one particular standout moment when Kohli equalled Sachin Tendulkar’s record of 49 one-day international hundreds.

It came in the 243-run victory against South Africa, and the right-hander described it in the post-match ceremony as “the stuff of dreams”.

The fact it was achieved on his birthday was the crowning glory in front of 70,000 fans at Eden Gardens.

Kohli and Tendulkar were teammates in 2011 when India last won the World Cup.

As well as standing on the verge of a second crown, Kohli equalled Tendulkar in 277 innings while Tendulkar took more than 450 innings to reach his 49th.

3. England are in the Champions Trophy – but only just

India’s greatest threat was supposed to be the defending champions, England.

But Jos Buttler’s side were effectively already out of the race to qualify for the semifinals while everyone else was still finding their feet.

The New Zealanders exacted a swift revenge, following their 2019 defeat in the final at Lord’s, with a resounding nine-wicket win in the opening match.

A victory against Bangladesh for England was followed by a five-match losing streak, which emphatically ended their defence of the trophy.

It also left England facing the ignominy of missing out on qualification for the 2025 Champions Trophy.

Buttler’s side had to win their final two games – against Netherlands and Pakistan.

They duly obliged and in doing so ended the latter’s slim chances of reaching the last four.

4. Never write off the Australians

Australia lost their first two matches, including their opening match against India, and seemed like they could be the first team out.

Seven straight wins followed for Pat Cummins’s side, capped by one of, if not the, most incredible moments at a World Cup.

Batting on virtually one leg, Glenn Maxwell made a stunning 201 not out against Afghanistan and guided Australia to a three-wicket win.

It also confirmed the Aussies’ place in the semifinals and the entire innings contained 128 balls with 21 fours and 10 sixes.

Cummins said it was “the greatest one-day innings ever played” and it came with the Australians 91-7, chasing 292.

This all came on the back of Maxwell hitting a 41-run century against the Netherlands – the fastest at a World Cup.

5. South Africa may be turning a corner

South Africa have been the nearly men of Cricket World Cups since their 1999 implosion in the semifinal against Australia at Headingley in Leeds, England.

The unkind and maybe a little unfair nickname of “chokers” has followed them ever since.

They too laid down an early marker at this tournament when Aiden Markram recorded the then-fastest century at a World Cup (since stolen by Maxwell).

It was only the second day of the tournament in India when he brought up the three figures in style against Sri Lanka in Dehli.

His team also entered the record books with the highest-ever tournament total of 428 in a 102-run win.

South Africa could have been considered India’s greatest challengers in the semifinals but for their meeting in the group stage. One of only two defeats for the Proteas saw them humbled by the hosts in a 243-run defeat as they were bowled out for 83 in Kolkata.

Source: Al Jazeera