WPL 2025: ‘Pocket Power’ Shabnim Ismail underlines the value of control in aggressive pace

Shabnim Ismail loves to cook. She has a mutton curry recipe that she calls her best offering in the kitchen, but has sworn by the fact that it’s too spicy for most people around her. 

Her efficacy and venom with the ball, as it turns out, has just as much heat if not more. 

The South African pacer with Indian ancestry – who bowled the fastest recorded delivery in the women’s game in a Women’s Premier League last season – has been a force to reckon with on the international stage and in franchise cricket. Her raw pace and ability to swing the ball early have now helped Mumbai Indians make its second final in three seasons of the WPL. 

She has eight wickets in nine games with a commendable economy of 7.11. Her pace makes her susceptible to being expensive too and batters did exploit that ever so often. However, Ismail is not one to be bested. She has played with her variations, primarily tweaking speed and length, to drag back the runs she concedes. 

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This season, she is one of only five players to manage a maiden over. She has the highest number of dot balls bowled (115) overall, well ahead of Delhi Capitals’ Shikha Pandey (94), and has also bowled the most dot balls in a single game (19 vs Gujarat Giants). 

Back home in Cape Town, her coach Henry Williams has been following her progress with bated breath. The pair worked together in December to get Ismail ready for a busy franchise season, with a dedicated focus on Indian conditions. 

“I made her bowl four overs consecutively, by which I mean once she bowls one delivery, she turns around, I throw her the ball and she runs in immediately. There is no breathing space between one delivery and the next,” Williams tells Sportstar.

“At the end of about six to seven balls like that, when the body becomes exhausted, the mind activates and thinks of what can be done. That’s the power we want to unlock for Shabnim.”

Aggression with purpose

Though Williams is busy with the Boland team ahead of the CSA Provincial One-Day Challenge Division One final on Sunday, he has all the time in the world for a call from India to discuss technique and more. Ismail did the same after the Eliminator victory against Gujarat Giants and he promptly reminded her against getting predictable with the short ball. 

“She was not releasing the ball properly in the later stages. Commentators caught on and were working out her lengths and landing. I’d like to see her go for the fuller deliveries and throw in some yorkers to really test the batters and constrict them,” Williams notes.

Ismail’s bouncers are things of legend. For such feisty deliveries to come out the hands of a 5 ft 4 inch pacer was a fascinating phenomenon for those following the game and a terror for those on the receiving end. It rightly earned her the moniker ‘Demon’. The sight of Ismail steaming in and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it speeds she bowls at can make the best in the world quake a little. 

But aggression for the sake of it does nothing. 

“Her use of the short ball was becoming predictable. People would expect Shabnim to come in full tilt and bowl a bouncer and do their homework to launch it into empty pockets for runs, particularly on the leg side. I kept asking her, what the point of those bouncers was. What was she trying to achieve? If she keeps doing it just for the fear factor, because of the pace, it is more likely to go for runs. So the idea was to be more purposeful about the kind of deliveries she bowled and ensure she got something out of it. I pushed her to ask herself ‘why’ before choosing that ball in an over.”

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Another element the pair worked on was her ability to swing the ball, particularly in getting some late movement on flat Indian wickets. Getting Delhi Capitals captain Meg Lanning out in MI’s season opener gave Ismail a massive shot in the arm, enough to head back to the hotel and tell Williams all about it. 

The first over of that game was a tantalising chess game between two retired pros. Ismail’s pace proved tricky for Lanning, who was beaten on three of the six balls. The South African used her outswingers with precision, drawing Lanning to have a go but beating her in flight. She eventually got her wicket in the seventh over. Once the early swing was off, Ismail continued to test the off stump line for Lanning and it worked.

In the reverse fixture against Delhi Capitals, Ismail opted to go fuller to Lanning. She angled the ball in and got a leg before appeal off the very first ball which Lanning survived. A bit too much width meant the Australian was able to negate her wiles. She went on to score an unbeaten 49-ball 60. 

The final gives this rivalry a third round and Ismail, who has found her rhythm at this venue, will be rubbing her hands in anticipation. 

Fire in the belly

These one-on-one battles have defined Ismail’s approach to cricket from the very beginning. She grew up playing alongside fellow South Africa national team cricketers like Vernon Philander and Beuran Hendricks. The boys never let her (the only girl around) have it easy, egging her on to try and bowl faster. ‘You’re not that good,’ they’d say and Ismail would promptly retaliate. 

“I discovered a few years after starting to work with her that Shabnim’s nickname was Pocket Power, named after a very famous horse in South African racing history. It fits! He was a very fast horse,” Williams exclaims. 

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He remembers that unpolished Ismail coming to him 15 years ago. After Deandra Dottin had smacked her for 20 runs in a single over in a T20I at Boland Park in Paarl, she was left teary-eyed but angry. The officials running the women’s game in South Africa then approached Williams, asking if he could help out a then 21-year-old Ismail.

The first-ever conversation between the pair was more about philosophy than technique. Ismail needed to know that bad days would come but it was up to her whether a good one followed.

“When I began working with her, she didn’t even know how to best grip the ball. It was all raw, untampered pace,” he remembers.

“When I worked with her, I was very mindful of leaving her natural delivery of the ball intact. I didn’t want to mess with that because that would heavily alter her speed. What I worked on was her run up, arm extension and wrist position so we could maximise the use of each ball. I worked on speed variations, efficacy of that slower ball and accuracy with her line and length.”

Williams has seen Ismail go from being a spunky rookie to a feared international legend. When she called time on her career in 2023, a few months after losing the T20 World Cup to Lanning’s Australia on home soil, he didn’t push her to reconsider. 

“Among other things, she spoke of not getting enough support to develop her own skills. She had maxed out what she could learn in that setup and was looking for fresh challenges.” he says. 

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League legend

In the fast lanes of franchise cricket, the speed addict in Ismail thrived. She helped Sydney Thunder to the title in WBBL 2020, where she got the better of Lanning once again in the final. A few months later, she popped over to The Hundred and won that too with the Oval Invincibles. In Welsh Fire colours, she lit up the league with a hattrick in 2023. 

In the first edition of the WPL that year, UP Warriorz picked her up but shockingly benched her for most of the season. She found her tribe in the MI setup with competitors-turned-mentors like Jhulan Goswami to share a dressing room with. Jhulan’s little cheer when they got her in the auction said everything you needed to know.

“Everyone wants to make another Shabnim Ismail but it’s not that easy,” former South African head coach Dillon du Preez said of the speedster during the T20 World Cup in UAE. Williams concurs. 

“To be like that, you need to have a fire in your belly. She genuinely wants to instill fear in the mind of the batter and that’s why she is so unplayable. But her aggression comes from a lot of control. That’s rare and dangerous.”

Outside the cricket field, Ismail’s life hasn’t been any less of a fight. She initially worked as a speed-point technician (person working on the debit and credit machines). She chose the financial uncertainties of cricket purely because of passion. She endured countless mental health battles and even alcohol abuse along the way. Over time, zipping away on the 22 yards has brought her the most calm she has ever known.

“People say when you get older your pace drops, but I firmly don’t believe in that. From a young age I wanted to be one of the quickest in the world. I know I am one of the best in the world,” Ismail said after her 132 kmph ripper — incidentally bowled to Lanning — in WPL 2023.

“I’m going to bowl f***ing fast because I don’t have a choice,” Ismail once reportedly said. It will be no different come Saturday, when she has the opportunity to bowl her team to glory once more, in a high-octane final between two of the best teams in the WPL 2025.