India is often regarded as the graveyard of quicks. The land of spin. The place where the best pacers come a cropper, where even journeymen spinners have the chance to make a name for themselves.
In India, in six Test matches, Jasprit Bumrah averages a ridiculous 12.80. Just take a pause, and let that sink. 12.80. That’s the number of runs he concedes for each scalp at home. Those six Tests have brought him 26 wickets; he has required only 28.9 deliveries (that’s less than five overs) per wicket, which compares favourably with his impressive career strike rate of 44.7. What’s this guy made of?
Also, where would India be in the second Test against England in Visakhapatnam if not for Bumrah, the explosive right-arm quick with the hyperextension in his right-arm, with the quirky walk-/run-up, with the unique action that is still a mystery even though he has spent eight years in international cricket and six playing Tests? In a spot, that’s for sure.
The spinners were expected to dominate proceedings, and India had three of them – R Ashwin, playing his 97th Test and with 496 victims against his name. Kuldeep Yadav, the left-arm wrist-spinner. And Axar Patel, who took 27 wickets in three Tests when England last toured India, in 2021. And what happens? Bumrah walks away with six for 45, his best figures on Indian soil. Along the way, he becomes the second fastest ever, in his 34th game, to 150 Test wickets, only behind Waqar Younis. Bumrah is gold, a freak of nature whose exponential growth as a thinking cricketer has lent a new dimension to his bowling skills.
By his own admission, because he played so much first-class and domestic cricket before breaking into the Indian team in early 2016, he learnt reverse swing before he picked up the nuances of conventional swing. Over the years, he has worked on that craft even as he has developed into a fantastic orthodox swinger of the cricket ball as well. His versatility is evidenced by the fact that exactly a month back in Cape Town, he picked up a six-for with the red Kookaburra ball. On Saturday, armed with the SG Test ball, he produced a masterclass in the art of reverse swing, leaving England’s Bazballers shell-shocked.
Like most modern cricketers, Bumrah professes no great fascination for numbers, insisting that he values his contributions more than measuring his success through the number of wickets he has taken. When he says it with a disarming smile on a day when he has left the opposition in disarray, you are tempted to believe him. Actually, you do believe him.
Here’s how Bumrah decimated the celebrated English line-up.
Victim No. 1, Joe Root: The former England skipper, who succumbed to Bumrah for the eighth time in Tests. Harry and hustle him by reversing the ball this way and that so that even someone as accomplished as the former England captain, wracked with uncertainty, is tempted to have a nibble at one he could have left alone. Welcome to the party, first slip.
Next up, the reverse-sweeping Ollie Pope: Having set him up with a couple of away-going deliveries, Bumrah weighs up his choices – a length ball coming in, or the inswinging yorker, which he hadn’t employed at all. He went with the yorker – ‘I just took a chance’ – and the result was spectacular. The ball started well outside off, tailed in a mile, ducked under the right-hander’s bat and uprooted middle and leg stumps. Shades of Waqar there. Pope gone to Bumrah for the fifth time.
Jonny Bairstow went the Root way, but Ben Stokes was proving to be a problem child. Bumrah went round the stumps and attempted an outswinger. The ball developed a mind of its own, went on with the arm, snuck outside the left-hander’s bat and hit off pole. Stokes dropped his bat in disbelief, threw his hands up in exasperation. How do you play this bloke, he seemed to ask? From the non-striker’s end, maybe, Ben?
Pope’s was an unplayable ball, as was the one to Stokes, even if only by accident. Root and Bairstow weren’t victims of the deliveries that got them eventually, but of the ones that had preceded them and that sowed the gremlins that germinated enough for them to be drawn into false strokes. When such illustrious willow-wielders were blasted out in a trice, what chance did Tom Hartley and James Anderson have?
Bumrah was tireless, unflagging, charged up. His last three spells read 4-2-3-2, 4-2-9-1 and 3.5-0-9-3, all in reasonably quick succession. After all these years, one finally understood why they are called ‘spells’.
