The 20-year-old Shoaib Bashir made his England debut in the second Test of the current five-game series against India. The 19-year-old made his first-class debut for Somerset against Essex in an English County Championship game a little over a month ago.
Though Shoaib Bashir didn’t perform well in his early games, he was able to gain the respect of England captain Ben Stokes and gain a spot in the squad without having to score goals. Moreover, Stokes was impressed even with his debut in the County Championship.
The footage of Shoaib Bashir bowling against the excellent spinner Alastair Cook was made public via Somerset’s X account. But the 19-year-old’s magic totally tricked the great batter.
Ben Stokes just had to witness Shoaib Bashir lose two wickets in an over for the young player to be given a chance to break into the Indian team.
After watching the video, Stokes immediately shared it on a WhatsApp group that included ECB managing Rob Key as well as head coach Brendon McCullum.
What I just saw is Stokes
In related news, Ben Stokes, the captain of England’s Test team, stated that he had just watched the video of Bashir bowling against Cook and questioned whether the team would benefit from having someone with his skill set during the India tour.
To be completely honest, my first real-life glimpse of Bash came from Abu Dhabi; before that, I had only seen him on Twitter. I believe the County Championship [account] put together a brief video of him bowling against Sir Alastair. Baz and Keysy are in the WhatsApp group that I’m in. The Hindustan Times cited Stokes as stating, “I actually did forward the clip on and say, ‘have a look at this; this could be something we could work with on our India tour.”
“I recently saw something. It was clear from the height at which he bowled that he gave the ball a lot of motion and revolutions. I believed this might be beneficial for India when I looked at it. I’ve spent a lot of time playing games here. Being a batter, you understand what is difficult, particularly when considering spin,” he continued.
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