Newlands closes a chapter and opens another for Bumrah

Series-levelling win underscores need to be more careful about Bumrah so that India always have him for the games that matter most

Five years are sometimes not enough to quantify the significance of a cricketer though in Jasprit Bumrah’s case, it can be a lifetime. There were memorable pit stops in Johannesburg, Adelaide, Melbourne, Nottingham and Antigua but nothing compares to the rewards reaped at Cape Town (18 wickets at a strike rate of 30.8) underpinning a career that—astonishing as it may sound—is only 32 Tests old. And it all began with his Test debut in Cape Town during the 2018 tour. Or as Bumrah put it on Friday: “The vision started from there.”

Jasprit Bumrah bowls a delivery on the second day of the second Test cricket match between India and South Africa, at the Newlands in Cape Town (PTI)

In absolute terms, we are talking about consecutive tour wins in Australia, drawing in England and coming close twice in South Africa—each of those highs engineered by the fast bowlers. Mohammed Shami has been magnificent and Mohammed Siraj equally diligent but through it all shone Bumrah’s perseverance to make things happen for India. He has been the driving force whose energy the rest have fed off, even leading the team once in Birmingham.

More importantly, he has also endured a debilitating back injury and months of rehabilitation to match that the verve of his Test debut and make India feel secure about its pace bowling health. So more than anything else, this latest drawn tour of South Africa only underscores the need to finetune Bumrah’s workload management in such a way that India are Bumrah-ready in the games they need him the most. Which means Tests in England, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand; and the ICC events.

Thankfully, there’s already a stringent policy in place. Bumrah has evolved as a touring specialist purely by design, the same way Ravichandran Ashwin has made himself indispensable at home. This policy feels a bit inverted though, broadly because if an Indian fast bowler is considered good enough, unlike spinners they play in most places. But Bumrah is different. His best caters to lofty aspirations on so many fronts that an equitable distribution of his playing days quickly became paramount to his relevance.

It explains why not until the fourth season of his Test career did Bumrah get to play his first Test at home, on an abrasive Chennai pitch. Next match at Ahmedabad, he wasn’t even required to bowl in the second innings as Ashwin and Axar Patel took turns to run through England. Two more Tests against Sri Lanka in 2022 add up to an overall appearance of only four out of 20 matches at home since Bumrah’s debut but it shouldn’t matter because India have won 16 out of those 20 games.

Here’s the kicker though: Six out of Bumrah’s eight five-wicket hauls outside Asia have come in wins, the other two garnered in a draw in Nottingham (2021) and a defeat in Cape Town in 2022. Even more incredible is how it took Bumrah only 28 Tests to get here, compared to 50 by Ishant Sharma and 45 by Kapil Dev for his nine five-wicket hauls outside Asia. West Indies might have felt picked upon in 2019 but by then it seemed like an inevitable culmination to a standout season that witnessed India beat Australia in Australia riding a record tour haul of 21 wickets from Bumrah.

Yet there’s more to Bumrah than some cool fifers. As it was in 2018, Melbourne was again the turning point of the 2020-21 tour and predictably enough, Bumrah was there to trigger Australia’s slide by first getting Joe Burns to edge behind before breaking an 86-run partnership between Marnus Labuschagne and Travis Head. That combustive win at Lord’s still finds mention more because of Bumrah’s dogged 89-run eighth-wicket stand with Siraj than KL Rahul’s 129 that set it up in the first innings.

It tells you how Bumrah has revelled in pressing situations, growing not only as a performer but also a living, breathing face of the team’s resistance away from home. Mentor too, as Siraj told us on Friday. “When we play together, he (Bumrah) gets the message earlier. We try to analyse the wicket a little quicker so that the communication goes to the bowling circuit that this is the wicket and this is what we are looking to do,” he said.

Which is why Cape Town is such a befitting bookend to what could be the busiest chapter in Bumrah’s life. When an early breakthrough was necessary to keep India in the picture on Thursday morning, Bumrah lured David Bedingham into edging a shaping away delivery. Marco Jansen, whose gritty fifty took away the game at Centurion, was sent back with a sensational catch on his followthrough. And when the tail was properly exposed, Bumrah quickly made his length fuller, inviting those drives and cleaning up the lower order. It was his fate that Bumrah looked bereft of support at Centurion, but at Newlands, he was leaving nothing to chance.