Wisden Cricket Monthly: Great transformations – 3 cricket superstars who reinvented themselves

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Rohit Sharma

England v India (Ageas Bowl, Southampton – July 29th 2014)

After Rohit Sharma was omitted from India’s 2011 World Cup squad, the crestfallen 23-year-old took to Twitter. “Really really disappointed of [sic] not being part of the WC squad... I need to move on from here but honestly it was a big setback!”

At the time Sharma was considered an attractive wastrel going nowhere fast. After 61 ODIs he averaged 27. His three knocks as an ODI opener had produced 29 runs. For the backwater boy from Maharashtra, who’d lived with his grandparents because his father’s income was too lowly and was discovered by a talent scout while bowling off-spin as a teen, Test cricket remained a faraway dream.

The turnaround came in January 2013, when MS Dhoni won the argument to push Sharma up to open in his ODI team. Sharma, given time and backing, was transformed. In his first innings he strummed an 83 against England. He sparkled in the 2013 Champions Trophy in tough English conditions. Later that year he hit Australia for 141 (123) at Jaipur. A fortnight after that, in the same Australia series, he registered his first double, 209 off 158. At the end of a whirlwind year, he was given his Test debut. He made 177 and 111* in his first two knocks.

A decade later Sharma has 48 international hundreds, five IPL titles, and the label of the most complete opener in the game. If it wasn’t for Dhoni, he may have sunk with barely a trace. PW

Moeen Ali

England v South Africa (The Oval, London – July 31st 2017)

No English cricketer this century has shifted shape or redefined himself quite like Moeen Ali. When he returned for one final blast last summer, replying to Stokes’ “Ashes?” text message with “lol”, he resumed a Test career which had taken on numerous guises since his debut a decade previously.

Going into 2013, Moeen was seen as one of county cricket’s more stylish also-rans, a strokemaker with good numbers, but not good enough to trouble the selectors. That year a bumper season would follow, as Moeen posted his second thousand-run campaign for Worcestershire. But it was his off-breaks, casually rolled out as an afterthought since he was a kid playing in Sparkhill, that really caught the eye. Moeen picked up 31 wickets across the year, enough for a winter Lions berth. Elsewhere that winter, Graeme Swann would bowl his final ball in an England shirt.

Swann’s retirement freed up space. Moeen was in the discussion. Swann, for one, could see why. “He’s a natural, he rips it. Moeen has to play.” By midsummer 2014, Moeen, by now a spinner who batted, was in the Test team.

Despite a rock-solid hundred which nearly saved his team at Leeds – in classic Moeen fashion, he never played such a knock again – his first two Tests against Sri Lanka were a struggle with the ball.

He was winging it. Ian Bell told him that in order to flourish at Test level, he had to bowl quicker. Ahead of the Lord’s Test against India, Kumar Dharmasena, the former Sri Lankan off-spinner turned ICC umpire, gave him an invaluable tip. Dharmasena advised him to grab his left trouser pocket with his non-bowling arm after delivery to get more body into his action without losing flight. “I tried it for one ball and knew it would work immediately,” he told ESPNcricinfo in 2015. He was away.

For four summers Moeen was a dangerous Test off-spinner and occasionally deadly batter. After 44 Tests he had five tons and 128 wickets. But England got too excited, shunting him up and down the order, misusing their perpetual wildcard. By the time of the 2017/18 Ashes he’d batted in every position from No.1-9. The result was a loss of identity.

That Ashes was a brutish experience. Moeen was bombed, bruised and taken apart. He would come again, here and there, and have his say in last year’s wild summer. But he was never again the same player as the homespun free-flowing talent who gave it a rip and to hell with the consequences. PW

Kevin Pietersen

Karnataka XI v England A (Jain International School Cricket Ground, Bengaluru – February 7th 2004)

After taking four wickets in a tour match against an England XI in 1999, Natal’s beanpole off-spinner, Kevin Pietersen, sat down with the England captain Nasser Hussain to discuss how the 19-year-old might escape South Africa.

Impressed by the kid’s front and evident talent – Pietersen had also biffed 61* in Natal’s first innings, thumping four sixes from No.9 – Hussain duly opened up his contacts book, and less than two years later Pietersen had arrived at Notts, where the legendary South African all-rounder Clive Rice was director of cricket.

The signing raised a few eyebrows. Pietersen turned up in the spring of 2001 with just two fifties from 10 first-class matches – including that 61 against the English – and 23 expensive wickets. But the brouhaha back in South Africa at his decision to defect – with Pietersen blaming the country’s post-Apartheid quota system for holding him back – suggested that the ‘off-spinner and lower-order hitter’ was more than the sum of those numbers. Natal coach Phil Russell admitted he was “disappointed to lose a player of Kevin’s potential”, while even Dr Ali Bacher, then the most powerful man in South African cricket, had been unable to dissuade him.

Bacher’s attempts to explain the thinking behind the quota system – that it was essential for the time, but that one day non-white players would be good enough to keep their places on merit – fell on deaf ears. “It shut doors for me,” he told the Observer in 2006. “I don’t think politics has a place in sport. We’re entertainers.”

As for Rice himself, he knew what he was getting. “There’s just something about him,” he said at the time. “I certainly see him possibly getting into the England team once he has done his four years of qualifying.”

Four years later, at the first opportunity, English cricket took the plunge. In his first outing Pietersen hit four tons in a week for England A (and bowled a few overs: zero wickets). Propelled into his first high-profile senior series, an ODI rubber inevitably against South Africa, he rode the boos to hit three centuries in six knocks.

Later that year, sporting a three lions tattoo, he faced Australia for the first time, bookending his first international summer with two unhinged masterworks, first at Bristol in an ODI (91* from 65), then in the Ashes decider. English cricket was in thrall, and very thankful. It had taken him all of six months. And he didn’t bowl a single ball. PW

Abridged version. For the full article, check out Wisden Cricket Monthly Issue #77.

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