Jasprit Bumrah rarely seeks out wickets, but on
Saturday he did, and it will be talked about for a very long time.
It was a cutter off. But there’s more. similar to how
the Mona Lisa is both an artwork and more.
With that ball, Bumrah pretty well bent time. or at
least from the batter’s point of view. At the crease, this was Mohammad Rizwan.
Very good. After leading the highest-ever chase in the men’s ODI World Cup with
a match-winning century.
To get rid of him, a unique situation was required.
And Bumrah spent the entire day preparing it. For the first five balls, he
maintained his pace. He also focused on a line that was close to the off-stump.
Rizwan makes a forceful shove. This causes a space between the bat and the pad.
Bumrah used four balls to pry open that tiny margin before bursting through
with the fifth.
It was a cutter off. However, the arm’s speed remained
unchanged. What does hitters in is that. The buildup is identical. The gather
remains constant. The elbow is held in the same hyperextended position. The
wrist snapping motion…
The genius is there, I think. Bumrah smacks the ball
straight down for the seam-up balls. He flips it over for this variant.
The ball moves extremely quickly through the air as a
result. However, due to the imparted revs, it digs in and slows down as it
reaches the pitch, which is why the slowing down is so strange.
Since Rizwan entered the shot so early, he was
completely outmatched because the ball initially appeared to be moving forward
before pitching and changing into something completely different.
He has used a slight shift in speed to stir up trouble
before. He caught Shaun Marsh with a drop shot that came out of nowhere in
2018. By the time the ball arrived, the batter was playing two separate strokes
due to that janky wrist of his, and he was unable to make contact with either
of them. With that slower ball, Bumrah curved space. It tempted Marsh to
believe he had an easy put-away when it was above his eyeline one moment, and
then crashed into his ankles the next. Later, in 2021, his offcutter
successfully lbw-trapped Ollie Robinson from close to the wicket. That much of
the pitch breaks off, and this occurred at Lord’s, far from the bone-dry
conditions of the subcontinent.
Bumrah has been the toughest challenge to face at this
World Cup. He has produced 47 false shots in 162 deliveries. That’s one better
than anybody else has managed in this tournament. Today, he had Rizwan moving
in fast forward while everything else happened in slow motion. It was preposterous.