4 min readApr 15, 2026 09:42 PM IST
The ideal T20 bowler may not be the quickest or possess bewildering excesses of variations. He may just be taller, cleverer and more accurate than most. Like Josh Hazlewood is. For much of his career, the prime years in his twenties, he was misconstrued as a T20 outlier, playing only three games in 2,161 days for his country and repeatedly getting snubbed in auctions. At 35, he is arguably amongst the best fast bowlers in the format, almost equal to Jasprit Bumrah.
When RCB acquired him in 2022 (for a not-so-unearthly 7.5 million USD), no one imagined he would be as influential as he would turn out to be. The shorter boundaries of the M Chinnaswamy, his home ground, rang sirens of peril; the batting-friendliness of the surface made the choice seemed counterintuitive. Besides, he didn’t fit the post-modern T20 bowler’s mould. He was not super quick, he does not swing or seam the ball appreciably like his Australian teammate Mitchell Starc. He cannot wield an album of magical balls. He was the unfashionable, unassuming Aussie, mild-mannered and affable, a genial giant of a man.
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Yet, four years on, he is as talismanic to RCB as Virat Kohli. In two full seasons with the franchise, he grabbed more than 20 wickets (20 in 2022 and 22 in the title-winning season of 2024). He is like the steady 20-goal-a-season striker in football. The level seldom drops. In these four seasons, he has nabbed 45 wickets in 27 games. Bumrah has only eight more, but in 12 extra games. The strike rate of 18.64 is better than Bumrah, and any fast bowler with 40 wickets in this span. The economy rate of 8.43 is the third best in the list after Bumrah and Trent Boult.
Hazlewood gets more bounce than most, he makes the ball deviate by made-to-measure millimetres and he lands the ball in the same patch, all night, day, or evening long. (BCCI/Creimas Photo)
But Hazlewood is not so much about the numbers as how he manages those figures, debunking all myths of the perfect T20 bowler being a variation-spitting speed dragon. His is a triumph of simplicity over the complexities. He bowls to right-handers and left, shuffles from over the wicket to round, without wasting a ball in realigning. So much so that the simplicity of his method obscures its flexibility. He has illustrated that the good old virtues of line and length, still hold immense value in the format, that you could be old-fashioned yet post-modern. You can wear bell-bottom trousers and spot long sideburns and still look cool in a Gen Z party.
To pound one area of pitch all the time is not a perceived gift in this format. Predictability is the fodder batsmen fatten themselves. But Hazlewood continues to be largely predicable — in the sense batsmen know his wares and craft — yet successful, conforming to the truism that good bowlers are good bowlers, irrespective of formats. He moves the ball imperceptibly either ways, slips in the occasional cutter and knuckle ball, which he employs in Test cricket.
But he gets more bounce than most, he makes the ball deviate by made-to-measure millimetres and he lands the ball in the same patch, all night, day, or evening long. He is the metronome that never relents. A high-class Test bowler could crack the T20 code more seamlessly than a white-ball specialist subduing the whims of the red ball.
The key to mastering formats perhaps lie in nuancing the hard length, its varied and complex deception. A swinging full ball, or a spinning, dropping length ball vexes batsmen in swing-spin friendly conditions. But hard length remains the most resolute threat to batsmen across formats, conditions and climes. It’s Bumrah’s most enduring gift; it’s what made Glenn McGrath wielded in his relatively short and sweet career. It’s what has made Hazlewood, seemingly anachronistic, one of the deadliest bowlers in this form.
