Jasprit Bumrah’s comeback to international cricket culminated in a special spell at his hometown at Ahmedabad. Aadya Sharma was at the venue.
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“I’ll be happy to see my mother at home. I’m going to see her.”
For Jasprit Bumrah, the India-Pakistan match was far beyond all of the drummed-up hype of a sporting war. The match meant going to Ahmedabad, his home: getting to see his mother was the “first, basic thing”.
Fast-bowling greats have often appended visual aggression to their ferocity with the ball. Bumrah falls on the other end of that spectrum: a genial, introverted boy next door who is well-spoken and thoughtful. His celebrations are rarely followed by air pumping and snarls, staring contests or nasty send-offs. More often, it’s just the gliding airplane he enacts, smiling with a glint in his eye, as if to cheekily show off the magic he so obviously possesses.
If it’s such an on-demand art, and he does it all so often, why would an India-Pakistan game be any special? So there was Bumrah, ball in hand, having met his mother or yet to, but going about his business like it was any other game.
In the same city, several years ago, a young Bumrah lived in a small house with his family. It was a house that couldn’t quite give him the space to bowl with conventional freedom. It meant bowling with a shorter, makeshift run-up – a habit that he’s extraordinarily held on to since – and perfecting his accuracy through necessity and not intention.
To keep his mother from waking up, Bumrah would bowl his rubber ball at the point where the wall joins the floor, creating no bouncing sound. That gave birth to his yorker, and in general, his accuracy.
All these years later, Bumrah returned to play his first ever ODI in his hometown: an India-Pakistan World Cup match, no less. It was the true litmus test (not that he needs one) of his cricketing return, and the reaffirmation that the modern great was fit and fine again to spearhead India’s fast-bowling operations in a crunch game.
What came out were two ball-of-the-tournament contenders.
The first one, as Bumrah explained later, was inspired by the turn generated by Ravindra Jadeja. Upon seeing that the surface had some sideways movement off the pitch for spinners, Bumrah decided to test the well-set Mohammad Rizwan with his own rendition. Bowling his second spell after a 27-over gap, he understood that the pitch had changed since he’d held the new ball, and decided to mix it up a bit.
It isn’t just the thinking, but the execution where Bumrah’s wizardry shows. To devise the off-cutter is one thing; to bowl it just at the right speed so as to get enough revs on it after pitching, to then pitch it in the right spot, and then move it off the surface enough to find the narrow gap between bat and pad amounts to sorcery of the highest order. He set this up after four pacy deliveries. Rizwan was naturally stunned, looking around in despair.
Even Bumrah, so often just the smile-and-acknowledge guy, turned into your typical pace bowler, jumping and pumping the air, shouting and screaming. That alone was a metric to say that, even for the man who can do it all, some deliveries are just special.
One great ball is enough to create a lasting memory. Two make the spell unforgettable. Next over, Bumrah clattered the off stump yet again. Shadab Khan, probably shielding his middle and leg stump in fear of another Bumrah incutter, was opened up by a delivery that skidded and straightened on pitching. There was another dismissed batter just staring into space.
Even after all these years, Bumrah doesn’t stop being an enigma. To bowl with a barely-there run-up, shortened yet again despite a change upon his recent comeback, and complicate it with a biomechanical marvel of a bowling action, and then manage the accuracy of a bowling machine is a feat that remains unmatched.
Bumrah has all that and a bagful of nifty tricks, each carefully thought out and executed to perfection.
When a young Bumrah used to bowl at home, he’d ensure there was no noise. Yesterday, in the same city, Bumrah bowled and a hundred thousand rejoiced in unison. The glass box holding the media juddered whenever India took a wicket, shaken by the collective cheering of a capacity crowd. Diametrically opposite was the Pakistan dugout, which would have shuddered at Bumrah’s dual strikes in its own way.
Now, spend the next few days reminding yourself of the Bumrah special: compare it with Mitchell Johnson’s delivery to Cheteshwar Pujara, or Zaheer Khan’s ball to Michael Hussey, or Shaheen Shah Afridi’s to Tamim Iqbal four years ago, or something else entirely. The previous day, Matt Henry had flummoxed Mushfiqur Rahim with a brilliant off-cutter of his own. It’s a World Cup that will have a lot more of this, crafty cutters, cross seams and everything else in between.
For now, Bumrah has given us enough content to rewatch. The comeback is truly complete, as is the homecoming.
