Siraj had never taken two months off in ten years, and his run-up came apart in Sri Lanka
India’s fast bowler has given an unusually specific explanation for the pace he lost in Galle and Colombo: strides that stopped matching each other. He found the rhythm again over five days at Chepauk.
Sep 12, 2026
Mohammed Siraj has bowled fast for India for ten years and in that time he had never taken two months off. He took them before the Test tour of Sri Lanka, and by his own account it is why he arrived in Galle a slower bowler than the one who left.
A run-up that stopped agreeing with itself
His explanation is not about fitness or age. It is about stride length.
“I’m purely a rhythm bowler,” Siraj said after the Duleep Trophy final at Chepauk. “If I’m not in sync, I can’t explode through the crease. That was the struggle in Sri Lanka. My run-up felt disjointed. Some strides were too short, others were too long, and that broke my flow and cost me pace.”
Gym work did not fix it, and he says he knew it would not. “Every bowler’s body is different, but mine doesn’t handle long breaks well. A short break is fine, but in my ten-year career, I had never taken two full months off. I was working out in the gym and bowling occasionally, but no amount of practice can replicate match intensity.”
That is a more precise answer than fast bowlers usually give about a bad tour, and worth taking seriously, because the same thing happened again in Chennai and then stopped happening inside one match.
125kph in the first innings, 135kph in the second
In the first innings of the Duleep Trophy final his speeds sat in the 125 to 130kph band. He got his first ball to zip past the shoulder of Abhimanyu Easwaran’s bat, then the Chepauk pitch flattened and he went for 140 runs in 25 overs at better than five and a half an over.
He blames the pitch only for what it did to his head. “In the first innings, the pitch looked fresh, so I tried to bowl too fast. Because I was forcing it, my rhythm was off. In the second innings, I told myself to forget the outcome and just run in with good, natural rhythm. The moment I did that, the old Siraj was back, and the ball started coming out beautifully.”
The numbers back the feeling. Second time round he settled quickly, was up near 135kph, and finished with 16-2-47-1 on a surface that gave bowlers almost nothing. East Zone still took the title on first-innings lead, so none of it changed the result. It changed him.
Shami told him to stop trying so hard
Mohammed Shami, whose 16 overs in South Zone’s innings cost 42, was the one who had a word with him about it.
“In the first innings, Siraj wasn’t finding his natural rhythm compared to how he bowled later,” Shami said. “I just reminded him that to get back on top, he needed to return to his core strengths. When your run-up and rhythm are in sync, your line and length fall into place automatically. That’s all we were talking about.”
It is a small thing, two senior India seamers working out a run-up between spells at Chepauk, and it is also the whole of the fix. Nobody rebuilt an action. Siraj stopped trying to bowl quicker than his legs were carrying him.
The workload nobody talks about
The other half of Siraj’s week is the part that gets skipped in the reckoning. He fielded for three and a half days in the second Test in Sri Lanka and was bowling in Chennai’s heat inside ten days of that.
“But for me, it comes down to passion,” he said. “When you’re representing your country, you can’t make excuses. You have to give every bit of your effort for your team and nation. Even if I didn’t get the wickets to show for it today, that hard work will pay off at the international level.”
He is probably right that it will. “After two months off, your body doesn’t react the same way. Everything feels a bit slower,” he said. “Getting through this game got my body moving again and brought my rhythm right back.” India’s next Tests are in New Zealand, and they go there with a bowler who has just said out loud what he needs to be at his best. Not rest. Overs.