Nehra returns but doesn’t bowl out

Local boy Ashish Nehra finally played his first match of the World Cup here on Wednesday. And although he bagged one wicket against the Netherlands at the Ferozeshah Kotla, for some strange reason the leftarm pacer did not complete his quota of 10 overs.

Nehra, who has had many fitness problems in his career, has been struggling with a back problem and despite skipper Mahendra Singh Dhoni declaring all players fit more than once over the last few days, the leftarm pacer was not played in the previous games. On Wednesday, Nehra, shared the new ball with pace spearhead Zaheer Khan and ended up with figures of 5-1-22-1. But he was still not given the maximum 10 overs he could have bowled.

Why? Well, it was not immediately clear. People extended different reasons.

Some felt that Dhoni may have just wanted to test his fitness in a match situation and that once he probably passed it, he felt that there was no need to exert him before the big game against South Africa on Saturday in Nagpur. The other view was that Nehra may have developed some problem, but this could not be confirmed. The pitch did not encourage pacers and the ball kept very low at times. In his first over, with no slip in place, Nehra opened by conceding a boundary to Wesley Barresi and even beating him once. But Dhoni, surprisingly, replaced him after just one over in which he conceded six runs.

Nehra returned only in the 30th over and struck with the very first ball. He lured Tom Cooper into playing a cover drive but the ball moved away just a shade to kiss the bat before settling into Dhoni’s gloves. But Dhoni again took him out of the attack, when he was bowling a good line and length. His second spell read 3-1-4-1. Nehra bowled the 44th over and was not brought back after that.

In fact, only two of the six bowlers — Harbhajan Singh and Piyush Chawla — bowled their full quota. Nehra now has 155 wickets at 31.50 in 118 ODIs. He has the best bowling figures for an Indian in the 36-year World Cup history. He took six for 23 against England in Durban in the 2003 tournament — the only instance of an Indian bagging so many wickets in a Cup game. Before this game, Nehra had taken 15 wickets at 19.26 in nine World Cup matches and scored eight runs in the lone innings he had batted.

Nehra bowled 5 overs and picked a wicket on his return to the team.

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