Bonkers? No, Bumrah
Part cricketer, part superhero
The insanity of Jasprit Bumrah starts at the top of his run-up.
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A fast bowler’s run-up is cricket’s purest rhythm. You hear it before you see it - the gathering drumbeat of spikes against turf, like a timpani roll rising in volume and intensity, each step a note in an evolving score. On freshly-cut grass, the sound is sharp and clean. By evening, on worn patches, it becomes deeper, earthier, like a mallet striking leather.
Some run in with venom, like Ambrose once did; others glide like Holding in his pomp, all gathered grace, barely audible. They all follow this law of rhythm, this build of momentum. The run-up is where potential energy lives, where pace is created.
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Bumrah walks into this school and tears up every manual placed on his desk. His rhythms are taken from prog rock - he starts his gallop with a simple 4/4, and just as you’re settling in, he hops, maybe a couple of times, then speeds up and changes to an odd time signature that neither you nor anyone around him can quite figure out.
Childhood friend Preet Mehta reveals an early knack for speed. “We used to take turns at batting; when one kid got out, another got the turn to bat. But Jasprit never wanted to bat. He would bowl and bowl for hours and hours. His action then was a lot simpler but he used to be as fast. There were times when he would break tail lights of cars with a rubber ball!”
As such stories go, hindsight is always 20/20 vision. You can retro-fit any event into the foundation layers of a mythical building. But, tracing back the Bumrah breadcrumbs, there has always been a hint of rebellion against the direction of the wind.
Bumrah’s first tryst with the Big Stuff™ is now part of Indian cricket folklore. John Wright, the ex-India coach then scouting for Mumbai Indians, found him at the Syed Mushtaq Ali Tournament in 2013. Gujarat had stormed into the final, and there was Bumrah, this raw, gangly fast bowler, winning them the trophy with figures of 3-14 in four overs on the big night.
Mumbai Indians were still hunting for their first IPL title, and the captaincy was changing hands that year like the baton at a 4x100 metre relay race. Under this air of chaos, they threw their find into the deep end. A debut against the might of RCB at the Chinnaswamy, that graveyard of bowling hopes. At the other end stood Chris Gayle and Virat Kohli.
Bumrah’s response was 3-32 in four overs, including the wickets of Kohli, Mayank Agarwal, and Karun Nair. One future India captain, two future internationals.
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Fast bowlers are at their most picturesque when they take their leap at the crease. It is such a symphony of timing and rhythm that the body turns into a piece of art - twisted yet symmetrical, hinting at something yet suspended mid-air for a split-second.
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When Jasprit Bumrah leaps, his arms whip around at odd angles like a broken catapult. It’s not just uncanny, it is unnatural and disorienting to the eyes of a batter who has trained all his life facing bowlers running in straight lines, jumping vertically with geometric precision, and landing further ahead on the same x-axis. He also releases the ball later than anybody else on the circuit, taking away precious milliseconds from a batter’s reaction-time.1
Cricket has spent 150 years teaching batters what to expect from fast bowlers; Bumrah makes them unlearn it in six balls. And yet, his bowling action is just the intro, the first passage.
Bumrah is in his ninth year of international cricket, and he cannot go three hours without his “awkward” action being spoken of as a key - if not the only - reason for his success. Interviews in 2017 and 2024 have the same tenor. Current and ex-cricketers, writers and commentators, they pin all his success to the mechanics.
At some point, the conversation becomes dishonest, almost cynical, as if to discredit everything that comes after and all that goes into whatever does. It feels like some sort of coping strategy, because we are unable to explain what’s been happening in front of our eyes.
Not that he needed one, but Bumrah found a kindred spirit in IPL-bowling partner Lasith Malinga. Malinga spent most of his career wearing similar accusations of hacking his way to success. His slingy, horizontal bowling action continues to draw suspicion years after he has retired from the game.
Like Malinga, Bumrah would make those labels look very silly.
But, back to his story. Bumrah had taken his leap with Mumbai Indians. Soon, he was playing for India and bowling the tough overs. First ODIs, then T20s. A reputation as a serious white-ball bowler blossomed and got stamped. A specialist for the short formats, hooray.
Virat Kohli and Ravi Shastri, firebrands who cared as much for labels as a Scorpio in Gurgaon does for traffic rules, yanked him into the Test team at the start of a long, gruelling season. Wait, too soon? Surely a step too far? Surely, with that action, with the IPL education - an inferior form of cricket to the real, red-ball stuff - he was not going to do it in Tests?
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There’s a moment, just before Jasprit Bumrah releases the ball, when time seems to fold in on itself. His run-up, that curious mix of short steps that shouldn’t work but do, builds to this suspended instant. The bowling arm goes sideways, like he’s mimicking the arc of a batter’s batswing. Bumrah’s wrist-position gives no clue about where the ball is going to go, how it’s going to move.2
Then the ball arrives - too soon, too late, too everything - and another batter finds their experience and skill rendered useless.
**
Jasprit Bumrah won India a match at Johannesburg in his first Test series. Within that calendar year, he played a key part in all of India’s away Test wins - at Nottingham, Adelaide, and Melbourne. By the last one, Virat Kohli was walking off the hallowed Melbourne Cricket Ground pitch doffing his navy blue cap at Bumrah, part in awe, part proud for betting on him.
And it was during that game in Melbourne when Bumrah shook hands with fast bowling’s ancient conventions while also laughing at them.
Bumrah set up the game with a six-wicket haul in the first innings. Amongst those wickets was a short-ball barrage at the young Marcus Harris, opening for Australia at the most daunting of venues but without any of the assuredness. Bumrah set a trap, and showed his Test-bowling wares by forcing Harris in that direction.
Then, as the teams prepared to break for lunch, Bumrah ran up for the last ball. Shaun Marsh was set, looking to play him out and coming back after lunch to consolidate. With the experience of 38 Test matches behind him, Marsh would’ve been expecting a yorker or an away-swinger outside the off-stump to lure a drive. Those were Bumrah’s main weapons anyway.
Or so we thought.
Bumrah bowled him a slower ball that looped and looped and dipped and ducked and finally caught Marsh on the pad as he was keeling over trying to get to it. That delivery was a perfect fit in the last over of an IPL semi-final; Bumrah was bowling it to turn a Test match. No hyperbole, it is one of the great deliveries of the 21st century.
Kohli, with the cap gesture, expressed what a lot of people felt at that moment. Bumrah was no youngster, he was The Main Man.
But, with all the new weight on his shoulders, could he balance all formats?
Bumrah went to the Men’s ODI World Cup and returned as India’s highest wicket-taker. Mumbai Indians won two IPLs on the trot, where he was the pivot their bowling plans revolved around. In the Caribbean, where fast bowling’s gods once ruled, he claimed a Test hat-trick with such artistry that Sir Andy Roberts - one of those very gods - felt compelled to approach him. “You could’ve taken the new ball in our team,” he told Bumrah.
Eighteen months into his Test career, and here was fast bowling royalty anointing him as one of their own.
It wasn’t so much the volume of wickets that drew the hype and admiration. It was the distribution - the ability to deliver in all conditions, in any format, with a pristinely shiny or half-beaten ball.
Most bowlers arrive with specialties, like musicians with their preferred tastes and styles. As a team builds a bowling unit, they need different specialists to cover all bases. But then, there are those rare ones who go beyond specialisations. They turn all of cricket’s elemental variables - weather, pitch, match-situation, ball-condition - irrelevant. For example, think Akram, Warne, Steyn - they could do whatever, whenever, wherever.
In the time most young bowlers take to merely acclimatise at the international level, Bumrah had already shown he was beyond belonging - he was redefining what was possible. This was a multi-instrumentalist with a range spanning from Frank Sinatra to Iron Maiden.
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One of my classmates in college was a state-level archer. After weeks of pestering, he let me come along for training one evening. The target was kept 70 metres away, a cardboard plank against the setting sun. Twenty arrows later, none had hit the bullseye. I remember thinking, “Long way to go, bud.” Then we walked to collect the arrows, and I saw it - every single arrow clustered in a tight circle around the 8-point mark. He turned to me with a quiet smile. “Training for accuracy,” he said, as I began collecting pieces of my mind and jaw from the floor.
There is a similar concept in bowling called “hitting the shoebox” or “hitting the sixpence”. Coaches mark out a place on the pitch where bowlers must land the ball, over and over. It’s a rite of passage at every coaching camp, young bowlers trying to find a level of control that will take them beyond those walls.
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Fast bowlers can rush batters through force and speed; a spin bowler has to find other ways. Their entire craft depends on deceiving batters through land and air, and deception only happens when there is a veil. The more accurate a spinner, the thicker their veil. But, the slower speeds help. At the top level, most spinners are relatively accurate, even if not always skilled at subterfuge.
High pace, on the other hand, is nature’s enemy of precision. The human body responds first with rebellion, then breaks down in protest. Every joint, every muscle fights against this unnatural act. To do it with any semblance of control is already a minor achievement. Young fast bowlers, you will find, spray it around like garden hoses in summer, their raw pace a trade-off for direction.
They all have to make a choice early in their career. Those who yearn for control shave off yards from their pace; others are more willing to leak a few boundaries for the thrill of watching batters cower with fear.
Pin-point accuracy at high pace is impossible. A bowler might get into a zone, where they bowl a few overs of precise grenades, but those come few and far between. At the toughest of situations, even the best fast bowlers have to manage their intensity.
Then there’s Bumrah. To watch him bowl is to watch an archer shooting bullseyes while sprinting. Ball after ball lands exactly where he wants, at speeds and angles that shouldn’t allow such accuracy. When matches teeter on the edge - a World Cup final slipping away, a Test match hanging by a thread, an IPL game where millions hold their breath - Bumrah keeps threading needles at ninety miles an hour.
At the 2024 T20 World Cup, he bent the laws: more wickets than boundaries conceded, an economy rate of 4.17, a wicket every two overs. Numbers that would be acceptable to a Test bowler, astound an ODI specialist, and break a T20 calculator.
As I write this, Bumrah has 181 wickets in 41 Tests. Keeping a fully reasonable filter of 150 wickets, he has a bowling average better than all but one bowler in Test cricket’s history. And he has achieved that while playing a majority of his cricket against the strongest teams of his time in Australia, England, South Africa, and New Zealand.
Bonkers? No, Bumrah.
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A group of batters is called a lineup. A group of bowlers is called an attack. There is poetry in these choices, this acknowledgment of cricket's natural order. Bowlers are the sport’s first citizens, its prime movers. They set the day’s rhythm, its pulse, its mood. A bowler always gets to pose the question; the batter can only answer.
Open any chapter of Test cricket at its peak, its most visceral, and you'll find a bowler at the heart of the drama. Cricket can survive mediocre batting, but without good bowling, it withers.
This is why we call them an attack - they don’t just bowl, they hunt. Great bowling units operate like wolf packs, each member with their role, their angle of assault. Some aim for the stumps, others for the edges, a few for the body - but together, they close all escape routes.
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In Test cricket, unless you’re using an actual minefield as a pitch, 150 is a sub-par score while batting first. It’s the kind of total that gives the opposition time, comfort, and the luxury of batting themselves into an unassailable position before the match is two days old.
When the Perth sun hung high at 3pm on day one, Australia must have seen a clear path to a 1-0 series lead. They had bundled India out cheaply, were going to face a rookie bowler on debut, and didn’t have to navigate India’s spin twins who, between them, have more than 800 Test scalps.
They did have to deal with Jasprit Bumrah, though.
In the first over itself, Bumrah beat Australian debutant Nathan McSweeney’s bat twice. In his second over, he sent McSweeney back. So much for a first bow.
In came Marnus Labuschagne, a highly-ranked and rated Test batter, not in great form but always a good bet to get stuck for long hours. Bumrah welcomed him with a ball that rode up high on his bat, and followed it with one that moved slightly away, found the bat’s edge, only for the chance to slip through Virat Kohli’s fingers. The third delivery jumped from where the previous two had played their subtle tricks of inward and outward movement, beating Labuschagne yet again but making him jump. Fifteen yards behind the pitch, Pant gathered it at neck height.
Third over. With the second ball, Bumrah again took Labuschagne’s edge, this time the ball dropping agonisingly close to the slip fielder. The third ball went away; the fourth ducked back in, ever so slightly, threatening the stumps, making Labuschagne acknowledge it with a, “Ooooh.” Bumrah finished this over by beating Labuschagne’s bat again.
Fourth over. Bumrah was now bowling to the left-handed Usman Khawaja. Experienced, solid, unlikely to play a rash shot. First ball: beaten. Second: forced to leap and fend. Third: surprised by one that swung in late. Fourth: surprised by one that moved away, edged, caught by Kohli.
Bumrah had brought thunder and lightning to sunny Perth. Australia were 19-2. There was more incoming, you could tell.
Steve Smith, arguably his generation’s finest Test batter, strode out. His technique is unconventional but built on cricket’s most solid principles. His defence is near impregnable. Bumrah hit Smith on the pad first ball. Gone.
Hat-trick ball. Travis Head, scourge of Indian dreams in the last eighteen months, player of the match in both the ODI World Cup final and World Test Championship final. This ball hit both bat and pad. It wasn’t an assured defence; few inches either side and he was gone too.
Bumrah’s fifth over saw him torment Labuschagne again. First, a bouncer sailed past; then came the trademark inswinger that forced an awkward contortion; then the rib-rattler that must have made Labuschagne question his career choices.
Even the quieter sixth over had Head merely fending and surviving, late to every ball, boundaries not even in his thoughts.
Breathe.
Thirty-six balls that telegraphed to Australia how massive 150 can look like when Jasprit Bumrah stands at the top of his run up. Five batters played him, none had any idea what was going on. Every ball looked like it could get a wicket.
Bumrah returned half an hour later, and under the fading light, took out opposition captain and fellow fast-bowling gun Pat Cummins.
Australia ended the day at 67 runs for seven wickets; they wouldn’t recover for the rest of the game. Two days later, Bumrah dished out an encore, a sequel that was just as thrilling as the original.
It is never not, when he has the ball. Opening the bowling; coming in after the ball has gone soft; or using the old, beaten ball to generate prodigious movement in the air - rarely does a bowler make you feel like a wicket is inevitable. Rarely does the pitch and scorecard become so ancillary to a bowler’s skill.
The more you watch Jasprit Bumrah, the more you realise that isn’t a bowler; he is a bowling attack. He is, as Osman Samiuddin called him here, a species of one - impossible to have imagined into being, impossible to replicate once he is gone.
Delightful piece.. somehow the exaggerations seem appropriate and actually underwhelming.. Nirmal Shekhar-sque!
beautifully written