156 kmph and counting: How India created assembly line of fast bowlers

The emergence of Mayank Yadav this IPL shows how India overcame the odds, tradition, and history to create an assembly line of fast bowlers, outdoing Pakistan

It is a five-decade-old incident that is worth retelling. Sometime in 1975, Kapil Dev, then a precocious 16-year-old, would get selected for a camp in Chandigarh that had a motley bunch of young, emerging cricketers. During the lunch break, Kapil demanded more food from the organiser. “Don’t you know that I’m a fast bowler. I need more food,” he asserted.

“We do not produce fast bowlers in this country,” the organiser retorted.
 

The response would firm up Kapil’s resolve to become a pacer.
 

Three years later, he was in Faisalabad, ready to bowl his first delivery in international cricket.
 

Until