India's bowling is arguably as strong as it ever has been, both in the pace department - with the likes of Sharma, Shami and Bumrah - and with their spin - in Ashwin they have the highest ranking slow bowler in the world. Jadeja isn't too bad either, and they also have the likes of Kuldeep Yadav and Axar Patel who have impressed in their short test careers to date.
Here we present an in-depth discussion of India's bowling, using the remainder of the outputs produced from the same model we used to analyse the batting. The data spans all India test matches from July 2016 up until the recently contested World Test Championship final with New Zealand. The model we use, described in more detail here, uses regression modelling to provide ratings which take account for the quality of the opponent. In practice this means that the wicket of a high quality batsman, such as Steve Smith, Kane Williamson or Joe Root. is worth more in our model than the wicket of a tailender.
Our model has an adjustable weight that allows us to place more emphasis on either taking wickets or preventing runs - we have chosen to order the players using a balanced weight that places equal emphasis between the two. In the 'Rating' column, we have included a numerical value to represent the 'ability' of each bowler, as computed by our model. The figure itself is arbitrary, but does help to give an idea of the relative strengths for when we compared the bowlers. In the final column we have included the rankings for when we weight towards run wicket-taking. This adds some important context around some bowlers who are valued for their ability to find a quick wicket - even if it does cost them a few runs.
For this analysis we have imposed a minimum qualification criteria of having bowled at least 100 overs for India across our chosen timeframe. The results are as follows:
The output here has thrown up a few surprises so it's certainly worth spending some time to go through the list and dissect what we see above.
Axar Patel heads the list here, which should be no surprise whatsoever given his ludicrous test match bowling average of 10.59. This obviously comes along with a small sample size warning - he's only played 3 test matches so far - but it's certainly an impressive start.
Next we have Bhuvneshwar Kumar, who is another with a relatively low sample size - the data used here only captures the latter part of his test career, from 2016 until 2018. His raw figures alone are enough to explain his lofty position in our rankings - he has the second best average (behind Patel), third best economy (behind Patel and Jadeja) and the third best strike rate (behind Patel and Kuldeep Yadav). In the last test match he played - against South Africa, 2018 - he earned a Man of the Match award for his four wickets, and it is a shame that he "just doesn't want to play Test cricket anymore" given his obvious quality.
In third place we have Jasprit Bumrah, who has been superb since he debuted in 2018 in Cape Town, and at the time of writing is ranked as the 9th best bowler in test cricket by the ICC. Whilst Bumrah's position in the list needs little justification, it's worth delving a little deeper into how he ranks a full five positions above Ishant Sharma, despite their identical bowling averages.
In part, this is down to Bumrah's superior economy (2.69 vs Sharma's 2.77) but is mostly down to the fact that Bumrah has generally had to bowl at higher quality batsmen than Sharma - the average Bumrah test delivery is to a batsman averaging 31.17 against India, compared to 30.02 for Sharma deliveries.
While we are on Sharma, it's worth examining how he has also found himself ranked below three bowlers who, if we were going by average alone, would appear on the face of things to have inferior records.
First we have Kuldeep Yadav, a left arm wrist spinner who has played 8 tests since his debut in 2017. Whilst his economy of 3.5 isn't especially impressive, it's actually his strike rate that pushes him this high in the list - it stands at 40.88 and is second only to Patel of the bowlers listed above. This is also reflected in the fact that he moves up to third if we weight towards wicket-taking.
Next we have Mohammed Siraj, who has been highly impressive in his test career so far, not least in the ongoing series with England. His average of 28 does make it surprising that he features so highly, but he has to date only played against Australia and England, and since his debut the average ball he has delivered has been to a batsman averaging 35 - which is far higher than any of the other bowlers listed here. It also doesn't hurt his rating that amongst his test scalps are the likes of Joe Root, David Warner, Steve Smith and Marnus Labuschagne (x2).
Behind him is Shami - but in truth there is little to separate he and Sharma in our ratings. Sharma's overall average is better, but Shami has performed fractionally better when we control for quality of batsmen - he has taken 33% more wickets than you'd expect the 'average' bowler to have taken bowling at the same batsmen. For comparison, Sharma has taken 28% more wickets than you would expect on average.
A little further behind these two is Ravichandran Ashwin who, as the current #2 ranked bowler in the world (behind Australia's Pat Cummins), you might expect to see ranked a bit higher here. The ICC rankings system, however, is a bit different from ours in that it rewards longevity - whereas our system produces and estimate of how good a player is given a sample of their performances, and as long as a player meets the qualification criteria they are treated no different to any other.
All this means is that while a few of the players who rank above Ashwin in our rankings are there due to a highly impressive, but as of yet brief test career, his place near the top of the ICC rankings is due to consistently impressive performances over a long period of time. That is something that we have not accounted for but it is still somewhat interesting to see that the likes of Bumrah, Siraj and Shami have all overperformed to a greater degree than Ashwin when we control for quality of batsman.
We should also note that Ashwin's relatively weak strike rate hurt him here... if we were to look at the ratings weighted towards economy, however, we would see him shoot up towards the top of the rankings.
Following Ashwin is Jadeja, and much of what we have said about Ashwin also hold true for Jadeja - he's been consistently good for a number of years and of course deserves praise for that, but he hasn't overperformed to the same degree as some of his teammates. Again, as with Ashwin, he is a very controlled bowler so would be amongst the top rated bowlers if we were to weight towards economy.
In tenth, we have Umesh Yadav, and it's a very positive sign for Indian cricket when a guy averaging under 27 over the past few years only just ranks amongst our top ten. He is considered as a strike bowler and as such would jump up the rankings to 7th if we weighted towards wicket-taking.
To round up our list, we have Yadav, Pandya and Mishra, none of whom have played test cricket since 2018. It seems unlikely any will be in line for a recall soon, although Pandya and Yadav are both handy with the bat so they might offer some balance to the side should, for example, Jadeja be unavailable. As we've seen in this article, however, India have an array of high quality bowling at their disposal and it will be very difficult for anyone to displace the likes of Bumrah, Shami, Siraj, Ashwin or Sharma on the strength of their bowling alone.
Thanks for reading! This article is part of a series in which we apply our player ratings system to each major test playing nation in turn in order to gain more of an understanding of their batting and bowling options respectively - please check out the other articles if you haven't already:
India - Batting | Bowling
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