It goes without saying that Shami is one of the finest all-format bowlers India have ever produced. Across formats he’s picked up 340 international wickets, he’s the first name on the team sheet in red-ball cricket when he’s fit and he’s represented the side in both 50 and 20-over World Cups in coloured clothing. However, this theory of Shami being a very good ‘all-format’ bowler floats around only because of the fact that he is world-class in five-day cricket and 50-over cricket.

To be fair to Shami, though, these numbers by no means give a fair reflection of the bowler he is. These twelve matches were played across five different years and not once in his T20I career has he ever played more than three games on the trot, meaning he’s pretty much never had any rhythm to work with. Thus, judging him by his T20I numbers would be a tad harsh. Hence evaluating Shami by his IPL numbers, where he’s played far more matches and the sample size is far greater, would be more appropriate.

An IPL regular since 2013, Shami’s numbers are by no means poor. He’s claimed 60 wickets in 65 games, has spearheaded the attack of multiple franchises and is one of 46 bowlers in the competition’s history to have taken at least 60 wickets. In each of the last two seasons, he picked more than 15 wickets (we will get to this number in detail a bit later). 

But, again, clubbing these figures with other important factors depict how Shami has been consistently erratic and unreliable. Among bowlers to have taken at least 50 wickets in IPL history, only Jacques Kallis, Praveen Kumar and Ishant Sharma boast of an average worse than Shami’s 33.45. This is still fine. Higher averages in T20s are acceptable if the bowler manages to keep the runs down. But Shami has never managed to achieve it in his IPL career. 

His ER of 8.89 is considerably worse than each of the aforementioned three names and, since 2014, he has finished 50% of the seasons with an ER over 9.00. In fact, among bowlers to have taken a minimum of 50 IPL wickets, Shami’s 8.89 is the second-worst behind Andre Russell, but the Jamaican has an average (28.08) and SR (18.8) far superior to Shami, meaning he has been a better strike bowler. Essentially, Shami is, statistically, the worst IPL bowler to have taken 50 or more IPL wickets.

This is harsh, yes, and it has to be acknowledged that he has done considerably well since moving to Kings XI Punjab ahead of the 2019 season. In 28 matches he’s picked 39 wickets - only Bumrah and Rabada have taken more in this period - and has maintained a pretty impressive average of 23.82. But there’s a catch here.

So, along the same lines, talking about Shami’s skills at the death….

Now that we’ve brought up his ineptness at the death, we might as well get to the next point - Shami being a liability at the death. We know that Shami can land yorkers and land them consistently. We saw it in THAT game versus Mumbai last season where he bowled one of the best Super Overs in the tournament’s history to stop Mumbai from scoring 6 runs. The deal with Shami is that this Bumrah avatar of his turns up very, very rarely. Almost always, minus the odd occasion, he is a liability at the death. 

These numbers are from his ‘best’ years. What about the ones before that? They were not any better, either. Between 2013 and 2018 - by which time he had already featured in a WT20 for India - Shami leaked 10.51 runs per over between overs 15-20. 2017, in fact, was the only year in which he maintained an ER under 10, and that season he sent in only 5.0 overs at the death. So the numbers pretty much tell us that he has historically been a terrible death bowler in the IPL.

What about international cricket then? Even worse, actually. For the Indian national team, Shami has an ER of 11.05 at the death. He’s leaked 162 runs in 14.4 overs and, while he’s had the odd good game, like the third T20I versus New Zealand in Hamilton last year where he defended 8 to enforce a Super Over, the norm has been Shami being a train-wreck in the final five overs. 

Let us introduce his competitors: Jasprit Bumrah, Bhuvneshwar Kumar, T Natarajan, Deepak Chahar and Shardul Thakur. Of these aforementioned five bowlers, Bumrah and Bhuvi are locks if they are fit, so Shami, really, is fighting for one or two vacant spots against the trio of Natarajan, Chahar and Thakur.

Natarajan can be promoted to the ‘lock’ list as India have a paucity of good yorker-bowlers and he is one. Moreover, the three T20Is Natarajan played against Australia - where, he took 6 wickets and maintained an ER of 6.92 - were better than every Shami T20I performance ever and he is also, on top of that, a left-armer, so he adds some precious variation to the attack. So with Natarajan also gone, Shami is essentially fighting with Chahar and Shardul for that final spot in the squad.  9.78

Shami’s experience counts for a lot, of course. He has now been playing international cricket for over 8 years and he has found himself in many a crunch situation and delivered. That, however, will not change the fact that both Thakur and Chahar are inherently better T20 bowlers than him. Whilst Thakur, as he’s been proving recently, is an all-round bowler who is only getting better with experience, Chahar, when it comes to his primary skill, which is taking wickets with the new ball, are levels above Shami.

And the numbers reiterate the same. If India do decide to pick Shami, it would be for his ability to strike up-front, but in terms of the same, he is not in the same league as Chahar. In overs 1-6 in his IPL career, the Bengal speedster has picked just 14 wickets in 56 innings at a SR of 47, while Chahar has struck 33 times in 48 innings, picking a wicket every 24 balls. And, ironically enough, for all his reputation of being a one-dimensional bowler, Chahar, in fact, boasts of a far superior ER (8.76) in overs 15-20 in comparison to Shami (10.37).

Batting line-ups don’t come more formidable than the English side of 2021 and against them in the 2nd T20I, the 29-year-old returned figures of 2/12 at the death. The sample size, of course, is minuscule, but Shardul’s street-smartness, coupled with the half a dozen variations he has up his sleeve, makes him a far more attractive and useful option than Shami in T20 cricket, even without taking into consideration his lower-order hitting, which could very well prove to be a difference-maker in the unlikeliest of situations.  

Three days ago India made an extremely bold but positive selection call and, in due time, they will have a similar decision to make on the bowling front. And if the same logic is to be applied, if numbers and statistics hold a bigger value than reputation, then Mohammed Shami should not be making it to the World T20 squad unless he drastically turns his fortunes around in the IPL.