The eyes of television cameras searched for Mohammed Shami. When they located him, he wore a shy, warm smile. He soon broke from the crowd and ambled to the run-up point, the trajectory of the next ball playing in his mind, the off-cutter that marked his two hundredth ODI wicket now a mere time-stamp on his remarkable cricketing journey. The moment suitably captured the essence of Shami the man— un-theatrical and un-obsessed with the statistical peaks, a superstar with an everyman’s persona, seam-scientist with a common man’s air. He wouldn’t have burned the midnight oil digging numbers or spent sleepless nights dreaming about his No 200, or evaluated his spot in the pantheon of India’s great fast bowlers. Such trivialities don’t fuss him. He is, at the heart, a pure romantic. The bowling is an extension of it—the flowing action, dancing as though to the percussive beats from the stands, the pliant fingers and loose, tensionless fingers coaxing the straight-seamed ball into a curvy, gyroscopic, path, and the sudden violence the ball assumes upon landing. …