Fast bowlers give India’s Cricket World Cup dreams a menacing edge

At an airport in south India, a Kolkata man is grinning. Arun Lal is 68, a lovely fellow built of grit, a cancer survivor whose jaw was remade with bone from elsewhere in his body and a former Indian Test opening batter of the 1980s whose job was to blunt fast bowlers.

Cricket’s fast bowlers, if you’re unfamiliar with them, are a clan of starers and swearers, who examine courage and ribcages by getting a leather ball to hiss, snort, jag and lift like an uppercut at unspeakable speeds. Here prayer won’t work, it’s simply turned into threat. In the 1970s in Australia, they took a phrase from the burial service in the book of common prayer and altered it into a fast bowling ditty.