Captain Rashid Khan is a white-ball legend and he doesn’t need much coaching.But it’s the pace-bowling unit that has stood up tall in this World Cup under pressure and you can clearly see some significant work has gone into it.
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While left-arm pacer Fazhalhaq Farooqi with 16 wickets is still the highest wicket-taker of the tournament, against Australia in St Vincent it was medium pacer Gulbadin Naib’s 4-20 that finally won Afghanistan the game. Add to that Naveen-ul-Haq’s 4-26 at a crucial juncture against Bangladesh, including the wickets of Taskin Ahmed and Mustafizur Rahman at the end, had Bravo written all over it.
The subtle changes of pace, the bluff that the short ball is coming and then pushing in a full delivery, the ability to bowl the wide yorker — this is something that Bravo had done all through his career right from the start in mid-2000s.
He had won many games for West Indies, and over the last decade, it used to be Bravo’s pet project for Chennai Super Kings in the IPL. The CSK fans can’t count the number of games the West Indian had won on his own at the death with his bag of tricks and now when he is retired from IPL, he works in the same way for his franchise as he is doing with the Afghan boys.
It’s Bravo’s understanding of the West Indian conditions that he seems to have tried to drill into this team. There’s, of course, Jonathan Trott, the head coach who does his job with a lot of passion and knows this team inside out, and then there’s the Bravo input.
Especially for a bowling unit like Afghanistan, that sometimes lacks the experience to kill off games, let alone win it from a tight corner with the ball, it was this inexperience that had brought about their downfall in Mumbai in the ODI World Cup when Glenn Maxwell had scored 201 not out on one leg as the Aussies thrashed 202 for the eighth wicket.
“You need to have those people who remind you of the things you need to do. In the heat of the game, they forget the things that were planned for a specific batsman and DJ is always there to remind them what we had planned and what we are doing,” Rashid said.
Now, Afghanistan will take on South Africa in Bravo’s actual home, Trinidad and Tobago, in the semifinal. Bravo knows the conditions inside out.
