In its hundred-plus years, cricket has been blessed with players who have transcended the conditions and delivered a masterclass with their expertise. Among these masters, a few fast bowlers have put on a show of pace and swing for the Indian audience on their docile pitches. Malcolm Marshall’s eight-for in Kanpur, Dale Steyn’s ten-for in Nagpur and eight-for in Ahmedabad, and Jimmy Anderson’s six-for in Kolkata are some brilliant examples.
Indian fast bowlers like Kapil Dev, Javagal Srinath, Zaheer Khan, Ishant Sharma, Umesh Yadav and Mohammed Shami have produced fantastic spells of fast bowling on these pitches using swing (conventional and reverse) to pick up wickets. However, suppose there is a fast-bowling spell that transcended all these mighty performances and kept the audience’s jaws permanently open for a few days. If there ever was such a performance, it was the one Jasprit Bumrah delivered in Visakhapatnam against England in February 2024.
India went into the Vizag Test down 0-1 in the series, and Ollie Pope’s 196 in the previous Test shook their confidence. Suddenly, India’s spin bowling looked beatable in home conditions. Adding to this was the English media piling on the pressure with their talk of Bazball’s superiority. India had to find some answers and find them fast before they went down 0-2.
Vizag’s ACA Stadium provided a flattish pitch, bereft of any grass but with good bounce. The teams reckoned that the pitch was excellent for batting and would last all five days of the match. The pitch surprised the Indian supporters, who had expected an ultra-spin-friendly deck like they had seen in the previous series against England.
India won the toss and batted first. Yashasvi Jaiswal, with his maiden double century, carried the team to 396. At the end of the Indian innings, most experts felt that India should have scored more than 500 runs. These feelings of inadequacy grew exponentially desperate as the English top-order batters raced off to 100 at five runs per over. Zak Crawley threw his wicket away to help India get an opening into the match. However, the pitch looked flat, and none of the bowlers, including Jasprit Bumrah, seemed likely to run through that formidable English batting unit quickly and keep them well under 396.
Indian paceman Jasprit Bumrah celebrates a wicket. (Photo by Stu Forster/Getty Images)
After Zak Crawley’s wasted wicket, Joe Root joined the in-form Ollie Pope at the crease to take England forward. Rohit Sharma brought Jasprit into the attack to exploit Root’s weakness against Bumrah. India had to chip away wicket after wicket, session after session, which was what Rohit must have thought; it was a game of attrition.
The first over of Bumrah to Root showed that the ball had started to reverse a bit. Jasprit repeatedly brought the ball back into Joe Root, hitting Joe on the pads. In those few deliveries, it was clear that Root’s inability to pick Jasprit continued. In the second over to the English No.4, the same story continued, with Root playing the line of the ball and somehow keeping the in-cutters out from doing any harm. Everyone knew the script would change; Bumrah would make one hold its line or cut away from Joe Root. The question was when, not if.
On the fourth ball of his second over to Root, Bumrah delivered a ball slightly short of a length, and Root came forward looking to play line of the ball, expecting it at about the height of his knee roll. However, Bumrah’s delivery hit the pitch hard on the seam, rose higher to Joe Root’s hip height, and reverse swung slightly off the line.
Root had already committed himself to the front foot to play the ball, and that momentum pushed him to edge the ball to first slip. As often as it happens during great spells of bowling, it is not the wicket-taking delivery that gets the batter; it is the string of deliveries in the lead-up to that ball that kills him. When he got out, Joe Root looked to play the previous ball, not the one that got him.
Every art collection has one piece: the pièce de résistance—the Mona Lisa for the Louvre or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. In Bumrah’s Vizag collection, it is the one that knocked out Ollie Pope. Ollie Pope came into the Vizag Test with his confidence sky-high, having conquered the Indian spinners in Hyderabad. In Vizag, too, Pope got off to a rapid start, showing off his class. From the runner’s end, Pope watched Joe Root being toyed with and nipped off by Bumrah. He must have thought that he would play Bumrah as late as possible without feeling for the ball away from his body.
Quite unexpectedly, off the fifth of the ball of his over, Bumrah delivered a fast full-length ball to Pope. From a slightly open stance, Pope moved his left leg across to the middle stump to get beside the line of the ball and drive the ball through mid-off. But much to his shock, the ball kept coming into him, and he moved both his legs hurriedly (no, he jumped) away from the ball and jammed his bat on the ground to balance himself and hopefully stop the ball.
However, while Pope’s brain gave all these instructions to his limbs, the ball had already gone past him, bounced in the space between Pope and the stumps, and spreadeagled his pegs. The still picture with the middle and leg stumps flying out of their grooves, the zinger bails flashing red, Pope on all threes and Bumrah looking up from his run-up to witness the carnage at the batter’s end is a piece of art for the cricketing Louvre: a pièce de résistance indeed!
Jonny Bairstow, England’s Mr Bazball, entered the scene after Bumrah painted his masterpiece with Pope. Bairstow arm-wrestled with the Indian bowling and tried to impose himself on them with a string of boundaries. However, Bumrah continued to test Bairstow on both sides of his bat’s edge: a few came in, and some left him. After a brief struggle against Bumrah, Bairstow threw his bat at a slightly wider delivery from Bumrah, trying to drive on the up and through the line, a dangerous shot with the ball moving both ways. Unfortunately for Jonny, Bumrah’s delivery pitched and nipped away, taking Bairstow’s outside edge to the first slip fielder, Shubman Gill. Like Root, Bairstow was undone by the wicked sequence of deliveries he faced from Bumrah rather than one magic delivery like the one that Pope received.
It was then time for English captain Ben Stokes to come to the crease and face Bumrah. Stokes has this notorious habit of missing the line of the ball, getting bowled and then reacting like he received a wicked grenade. From around the sticks, Bumrah pitched a ball outside the off-stump line of Stokes and reverse swung the ball into the England skipper. Stokes stood in his crease and hung his bat away from his body, thinking that the ball would hold its line. However, the ball swung into Stokes, beat his bat, and headed for the stumps. Stokes reacted late and moved the bat back in but was too late to meet the ball.
Meanwhile, the ball had messed up his stumps. After hearing the timber, Stokes, as usual, dropped his bat and acted like the ball kept low or somebody fooled him mid-flight. The last part is true; Bumrah had the shiny side of the ball in such a way as to change the trajectory of the ball mid-flight to swing into Stokes.
After the three pearlers, all that Bumrah had to do was bowl fast and straight at Tom Hartley and Jimmy Anderson to help the batters surrender their wickets. Tom Hartley swung his bat hard, only to give an edge to the slip, while Anderson went meekly trying to defend and missed the line to be trapped LBW.
Anderson’s wicket ended a dramatic spell from Bumrah, which swung the Test’s advantage in India’s favour. A few hours before this Bumrah-induced carnage, nobody anticipated a fast bowler to single-handedly engineer England’s downfall. Jasprit, indeed, engineered the downfall with his fantastic understanding of the physics of the swinging ball. A six-for of the highest order!
The second innings of the Test saw another piece of mastery from Jasprit, this time with guile more so than pace. After an initial collapse, the English batters, Ben Foakes and Tom Hartley, resurrected the chase and looked to challenge the Indians. Rohit Sharma went to his strike weapon, Bumrah, to end the partnership. During the innings, Ben Foakes drove the ball down the ground well, and with no swing on offer, the seam bowlers couldn’t beat his bat and induce an edge from his drives.
Jasprit had to think of a different ploy to induce a false shot from Foakes. With no palpable change in his action, Jasprit bowled a slow off-cutter to disturb the rhythm of Foakes’ bat swing. As Bumrah anticipated, Foakes went early into the drive expecting a normal-paced full ball. But the ball arrived late to Foakes, who adjusted to the change of pace by rolling his wrist over the ball and flicking it to mid-on. In trying to do so, Foakes could only give a return catch to Jasprit.
This is not the first time Bumrah used a slow ball in Test matches against the run of play to deliver a crucial wicket for India. Indian cricket followers will remember his well-disguised off-cutter to Ollie Robinson in the famous Lord’s Test win in 2021. Which batter expects a fast bowler, bowling around the sticks, to bowl a slow off-cutter like an off-spinner to get him LBW? However, batters better expect the unexpected when playing an inventor-artist like Jasprit ‘da Vinci’ Bumrah.
As they say, ideas are cheap; it is the execution that counts. Jasprit imagines, invents and executes it – the Leonardo da Vinci of cricket.