India won the fifth Test because Mohammad Siraj consistently bowled a fast, lethal line around the off-stump, moved the ball both ways at will and produced vicious dipping yorkers on demand.

His spell on the morning of the fifth day with the old ball was a case study in seam-bowling perfection. It had respectable English batters poking at the air like novices. For the first time, lay spectators like us were shown, as in a lecture demonstration, what the fuss regarding Siraj was about.

Siraj’s backstory and his Energiser Bunny reputation are important elements of his persona, but they are also clichés that journalists and commentators looking for ‘colour’ use as a lazy substitute for description. The fact that he is an auto-rickshaw driver’s son whose father died when he was on his first tour in Australia, that he stayed on despite being a fast-bowling reserve, then found a place in the team through injury and took five wickets, makes his coming-of-age story a fairy tale.

In a well-meaning way, then, Siraj exists in the public mind as a trier, all commitment and heart and pumping arms and legs and willingness. Add to this his obvious love for what he does, his Captain Haddock smile, his dancer-like repertoire of bhavas — rage, triumph, puzzlement, dejection, joy — and the temptation to pigeonhole him as a tireless trier, a reliable workhorse who complements more skilled but less robust colleagues, can be irresistible. It should be resisted.

Just recently, a cricket journalist and commentator tweeted that Siraj would have been a fine complement to India’s pacer duo of the Nineties, Javagal Srinath and Venkatesh Prasad. The trouble with this hypothetical trio is that Prasad, not Siraj, would have been the auxiliary. Siraj has more wickets, a better strike rate and economy rate than Prasad and bowls much faster than Prasad ever did. In that last hour at the
Oval, Siraj sometimes hovered around the 90mph mark and the yorker that did for Atkinson whistled in at just under 90.

The only Indian fast bowler with a better record than Siraj, with the exception of Jasprit Bumrah (arguably the world’s most lethal bowler this century), is Kapil Dev. A case might be made for Javagal Srinath on account of his five-wicket hauls and aggregate wickets, but really, that’s mainly down to the fact that Siraj has had to share seam bowling honours and wickets with Bumrah and Mohammad Shami, the two best fast bowlers in India’s Test history. He doesn’t always get the new ball or the choice of ends as Zaheer Khan and Srinath always did. Siraj’s results in this five-Test series, where he has had to lead the attack in the Tests that Bumrah didn’t play, speak for themselves. Over the whole series, he was the best seam bowler on view.

Thanks to the increasing numeracy of cricketing pundits, we have evidence of his excellence. CricViz, a cricket data and analytics provider, calculated that Siraj drew a false shot from the batter 283 times. Which is to say that he forced the batter to miss or edge the ball on all these occasions, deprived him of that precious commodity, control. “…no Indian seamer has ever drawn more (false shots) since records began, and only five bowlers…can match him.”

In every kind of job, there are those who have a real vocation for that sort of work and those who do a more or less competent job because it is a living. In the old days, a vocation described a religious calling; today it’s used to name a consuming passion for what you do. It can be anything from teaching to fast bowling. For Siraj, tearing in off a long run and making the ball move at speed, is a calling. He gives it everything not just in effort but more sublimely, in skill.

So the next time we think ‘lion-hearted trier’ watching him bowl, we should consciously kill that patronising thought. I learn with horror that there exist people presumptuous enough to call him ‘Miyan Bhai’. They ought to know better. Siraj isn’t your brother, he’s your daddy.