With a skip and a stutter, Bumrah conjures up another miracle

If you were watching him for the first time in your life, you might think it a miracle that he delivers the ball at all.

Jasprit Bumrah is the best bowler I have ever seen. There’s a slight cheat in this claim. I don’t mean that he is better than everybody else, only that he is as good as the best. I have no qualifiers to offer except my limitations of judgement and experience.

India's Jasprit Bumrah in action against Pakistan (REUTERS)

This list includes Wasim Akram and Waqar Younis of Pakistan, Curtly Ambrose and Courtney Walsh of West Indies, the South Africans Allan Donald and Dale Steyn, England’s Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad, Glenn McGrath and Pat Cummins of Australia. If we include spinners, and why should we not, throw in Shane Warne, Muttiah Muralitharan, Anil Kumble, and Ravichandran Ashwin.

Some of these great bowlers have taken a thousand international wickets or more. Bumrah is at (as yet) only a third of the way there. But what a third! As we might exclaim of a virtuoso sitarist or a wonder-working masseur: uske haathon mein jaadoo hai! He is a chef’s kiss of a bowler.

Let’s look at the two moments of magic on Saturday in Ahmedabad. Brought on mid-innings for his second spell, Bumrah slipped to the well-set Mohammad Rizwan a delivery that beat him with change of pace, dip, turn – the tricks a master offspinner might do in his adversary with. Bumrah thought to try this because he’d noticed Ravindra Jadeja getting a few deliveries to grip and turn.

In his next over, he sent down one that zoomed into Shadab Khan, zipped past his outside edge and into the offstump. This delivery, he clarified, was not a leg-cutter but an “outswinger on the reverse” – so much a fast bowler’s delivery that it came with a Waqar stamp of approval.

This is not considering the rest of Bumrah’s brilliant spell, without which these moments may have never come about, or for that matter his excellent new-ball spell. Seven overs, two wickets, 19 runs, but some 2 for 19s are worth the Player-Of-The-Match award.

It is the least of Bumrah’s skills that he delivers miraculous balls. If you were watching him for the first time in your life, you might think it a miracle that he delivers the ball at all. His action could be a prank, or a send-up of someone in a Lagaan sequel.

As he walks and shuffles towards the crease you want to tell him, come on, be serious; at some stage you start to convince yourself that perhaps this will metamorphose into something classifiable as a bowling action. Yet the skipping and stuttering never entirely disappears and he is suddenly in his now-iconic tinman delivery stride: one fisted arm stretched straight ahead, the other, cradling the ball, raised up like an antenna.

Then he shows the traits that might, in some number, be found in many elite bowlers, but all together in the rarest of the rare. He moves the ball in the air and off the pitch, either way, sometimes in different directions in the same delivery. His control of length is impeccable; his creation of angle is magnificent. He can bust your toes and bruise your nose. He rarely bowls bad balls. To both left-handers and right he can go over and around the wicket to remarkable effect. He shines in three formats of the game. He is so clever that he doesn’t need to put his fingers to his temple, but when he does in celebration, like in Delhi against Afghanistan the other day, it seems only right.

There was a wonderful moment in the 2019 IPL final, with 18 left for Chennai Super Kings to get in two overs with six wickets in hand. Bumrah took a wicket and gave up just five runs in his first five deliveries. The last ball of his over went right through the wicketkeeper Quinton de Kock’s gloves for four byes. There might have been all kinds of pressure on a 25-year-old busting his gut: a title on the line, a big crowd, the prospect of a pissed off captain, coach or an Ambani. Bumrah did not snarl, he did not shout, he did not make an involuntary grimace. He smiled. Then he went over to de Kock and put his arm around him.

It was a sporting spirit starkly absent at the Narendra Modi stadium yesterday. When Babar Azam spoke to Ravi Shastri at the toss he was greeted with boos; boos went up at the end of Pakistan’s national anthem. None of the opposition boundaries or milestones was received with even the mildest, instinctive show of appreciation. The Indian board had kept Pakistani fans out of the stadium, and Indian fans were not going to let Pakistani players taste any grace.

If Bumrah was a youngster in the audience, as he would have been not so long ago right here at Motera, his home ground, I like to think he would have clapped and smiled.