Now that’s quite a claim, isn’t it? Jade Dernbach, two matches into his international career, being compared to Lasith Malinga, the ultimate limited overs bowler of his era. As far as England are concerned, though, the young Surrey seamer is their answer to the mop-haired Sri Lankan.
Jade Dernbach has enough tricks and talent to become a key component in England's limited overs side
It’s all about tricks of the trade, you see. Providing something different, befuddling the opposition with a range of skills and making yourself very difficult to score against. Both Dernbach and Malinga posses within their armouries an arsenal of deliveries to bamboozle the best of batsmen.
The key to both men is the slower ball. David Saker, the England bowling coach, has been getting very excited about this aspect of Dernbach’s game. His favourite method of delivering this ball is via the back of the hand with no discernable change in his action.
The batsman is always left trying to second guess, trying to decipher whether the ball will be arriving at 70mph or at 90mph. Malinga, with his famously slingy action, also varies his speed similarly (low 70s to low 90s) and can also call upon a vicious in-swinging Yorker. Good luck scoring any runs against that at the end of an innings.
For Dernbach to scale the heights of the game, he must learn from Malinga. The art of limited overs bowling is not always to take wickets, but to keep the scoring down. If you manage that, the wickets will come.
It has been a criticism of Dernbach at Surrey that he’s not always as patient as he should be. Rather than hit a good line and length to grind a batsman down, he’ll try to bowl six wicket taking deliveries per over.
This youthful exuberance will surely escape him on the international stage and he can become a key component in England’s future limited overs plans. Whether or not he will make the grade at Test level is questionable.
In the Test arena batsman don’t need to score off of every delivery. Getting in behind a delivery, whether bowled at 70mph or 90 mph, is an option and the batsman has more time to work out his opponent. Malinga’s respective figures across the formats suggest this to be the case.
In Tests the Sri Lankan averages 33.15 runs per wicket from his 30 games. In ODIs, however, he averages 26.08.
Dernbach’s Surrey career follows an identical pattern: an average of 31.88 in four day cricket and an average of 26.22 in the one day stuff. All signs point to a flourishing limited overs career, even if it may well prove unspectacular at Test and First Class level – the antithesis of James Anderson, if you will.
Although Dernbach has said that he sees himself as being most similar to Anderson within the England set-up, Anderson has never flourished in ODIs but has been a huge success in Tests (at least recently). I’d venture to suggest that Dernbach will never flourish in Tests, but will be a huge success in ODIs.
It is of course too much to expect Dernbach to instantly become England’s Malinga, but the potential to mix it up in similar fashion is clearly there and the two have a lot in common. It wouldn’t be a surprise to see Dernabch’s career solely focussed upon limited overs cricket, just like Malinga.
By Miles Reucroft
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With bowlers like these they are a force to be reckoned with, the problem I find with most of our batsmen in the region (West Indies that is) is that they are too flat footed and they are afraid to move with the bat and come down the crease and face a spin attack from either Dernbach and Malinga. This cause them to loose wickets quiet easily without the umpire batting an eye saying when in doubt the batsman has the benefit of the doubt. I do believe that the current crop of West Indian batsmen should learn how to face spin bowler and also remember that they to must be willing to have included in their squad a good mix of both spin and pace bowler. Those guys who know they can bowl spin should rise to the occasion and bowl, it has no come to the realization of many teams that spin bowlers are the way to go to win matches, pacer bowler are a thing of the past and the pitches have changed tremendously and cannot at all time accommodate pace bowler.