Believe. If the popular television series ‘Ted Lasso’ had to be summed up with one word, it would be: believe. For the uninitiated, Ted Lasso is a fictional character in the eponymous show who comes from the USA to take over a Premier League club in England, created on the back of a viral promotional campaign for the league. Ted Lasso’s belief system is, well, belief. Very early in the series, he puts up a handwritten sign on the top of the wall at the entrance to his office in the dressing room. The sign becomes a central plot point of the entire show, going from a goofy thing to getting ripped apart for a good reason, then getting ripped apart in anger, then getting pieced together in an emotional final flourish.
Believe: that word is also central to the singularly unique cricketer that is Mohammed Siraj. Previously, it wasn’t about him. He made that word popular because of his admiration for Jasprit Bumrah. After India’s T20 World Cup triumph, he said in a post-match chat, eyes filled with tears: “I only believe on Jassi bhai because game changer player he is – only one Jasprit Bumrah.” But, in a way, it was also about him; you would be hard-pressed to find a cricketer who celebrates the successes of his teammates more than Siraj.
Siraj today… pic.twitter.com/qigRHT9zsk
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And at The Oval, where he was now the protagonist, it was that word that once again rang truest. Siraj said that when he woke up on Monday, he believed completely that he would be a game-changer for his side. “When I woke up this morning [at 6am and not his usual 8am], I told myself I would change the game. I opened Google, downloaded a ‘believe’ image [with Cristiano Ronaldo’s image], and put that as my phone wallpaper.”
He believed. He manifested. He ran in hard one more time on the 25th day of action in a five-match Test series where he was the last pacer standing. He didn’t always succeed, but he never stopped trying. In the end, that’s all an athlete can strive for. It couldn’t have been more Ted Lasso-coded.
Siraj and Ted Lasso might be different people – for starters, only one of them is real – but some similarities are unmissable. Both men overflow with positive energy when things are not necessarily going their way. Siraj doesn’t hide his emotions on the field. He lives every moment like any of us would. As we saw after that ‘dropped’ catch of Harry Brook on Day 4 in the final Test. “After yesterday’s incident, I thought the match was gone. Had we got Harry Brook out before lunch, things would have been different. There would have been no fifth day. That was a game-changing moment. But we came back strongly after that,” Siraj said. The images said the story: where Siraj was as dumbfounded and disappointed as some of the Indian fans just behind him.
And then after the heartbreak at Lord’s. As the ball trickled onto the stumps from the middle of his bat, he sank to his knees. In the Instagram post after that match, he wrote: “Some matches stay with you, not for the outcome, but for what they teach.”
It was fitting then that Siraj was at the heart of India’s stirring fightback late on Day 4 and for one mesmerising hour on Day 5. He had bowled more deliveries than anyone else across the five matches, but somehow found a spring in his steps to go for another spell. According to Cricviz, Siraj’s 1,118 deliveries were bowled across 47 spells in this series, and not one of them was slower than 131kph. The wicket-taking delivery that clinched the match for India – a thrilling yorker to Gus Atkinson when every fielder apart from the wicketkeeper was patrolling the boundary and he found the only possible way to take the wicket – was clocked at 143kph, his fifth fastest ball of the entire series.
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Like Ted Lasso, Siraj’s defining quality might not be that of being a genius. It’s simpler, more primal. Lasso wasn’t a Jose Mourinho or Pep Guardiola (the latter actually plays a cameo in the series, spoiler alert, and becomes a fan of Lasso). Heck, takes his time to even understand the rules of the sport he has known as soccer all his life. And Siraj, at the heart of his art, is about keeping things simple. “My only plan was to bowl consistently at one spot and to move the ball in and out from there. I didn’t want to try too much because that could have released the pressure,” he’d go on to say.
But the thing with belief, is that it cannot be just an intangible. It has to truly come from within. Mid-way through the series, Ted Lasso tears down the sign that he had put up, but follows that up with another speech. The show had its detractors for being too positive, for depicting unrealistic niceness. But what follows from Jason Sudeikis, the actor playing the coach, is perhaps the best summation of what Siraj willed himself on to achieve at The Oval.
“You know what I wanna mess around with? The belief that I matter… regardless of what I do or don’t achieve. Or the belief that we all deserve to be loved, whether we’ve been hurt or maybe we’ve hurt somebody else. Or what about the belief of hope? Yeah? That’s what I want to mess with. Believing that things can get better. That I can get better. That we will get better. Oh man. To believe in yourself. To believe in one another. Man, that’s fundamental to being alive. And look, if you can do that, if each of you can truly do that, can’t nobody rip that apart.”
