why i could never make the cut as a fast bowler

From my earliest cricketing memories to my adolescent cricketing fantasies, I have always dreamt of bowing fast. Now, I’m not at all physically built to bowl at speeds approaching the 90/100mph mark but I was adamant. Quite a few people dissuaded me, trying to get me to bowl left arm spin instead, most notably Balwinder Singh Sandhu (now one of India's top coaches but best remembered for his banana delivery to Greenidge in the 1983 WC finals) who tried twice to get me to change from pace to spin, once when he was coach at RCF in Mumbai and the other time when he was the coach of the Maharashtra Ranji trophy team, of which I was a member. On both occasions, he told me quite bluntly that I did not have it in me to become an international standard fast bowler and I would be better off bowling spin. Apparently, he had watched me bowl spin during practice on a couple of occasions and thought that I had ‘real promise as a finger spinner’. However, I was too enamored by the glamour associated with fast bowling to consider taking up spin. As an all-rounder, I was well aware of the kind of terrorized awe batsmen held fast bowlers in when they – the fast bowlers – were on song and I craved that sort of awe. I worked very hard on my bowling and become good enough to be called a genuine all rounder at the national level. But of course, even in my most megalomaniacal moments, I could never call myself a ‘fast’ bowler.
In hindsight, I feel that Ballu was correct. Bowling fast requires a certain body structure which I don’t possess. Besides the lack of height – I stand at 5’8” – I now realize that I don’t and never had the musculature to get the kind of torque that is so essential for fast bowling. Also, I was a self taught bower. During my time, we did not have any good bowling coaches in Pune/Mumbai and whatever coaching methods that were employed were crude at best. Even so, I do not believe that I would have become a genuine fast bowler even if I would have had access to superior and more sophisticated coaching methods.