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Assume we are assembling the perfect fast bowler for
the contemporary game. It goes without saying that there is no such thing as
the ideal fast bowler. There is no such thing as perfection, and fast bowlers
are not assembled in a uniform manner. Fast bowlers gradually erode over time,
much like rocks do.
Command? Very important. There would need to be magic
involved. An extraordinary act would be a favour from nature. Now combine all
of the above. because then discard it all since the headline has already hinted
at the direction this is headed, because Jasprit Bumrah is Jasprit Bumrah, a
species consisting of precisely one, as this World Cup has so eloquently shown.
These characteristics are only points of reference, a
method to use what we have already understood in the past to make sense of the
rarefied height that Bumrah is currently working at. Possibly the most
effective approach to convey this is in a way that initially defies logic. If
there was ever a whisper to be found in anything, it would be in these three
things when watching Bumrah bowl in this World Cup. These whispers may be
ephemeral and prone to misinterpretation, but they are conveyed with the unwavering
surety of truth in the situations and moods he has created.
If you’ve seen him, you know right away that the tone
he sets at the beginning of an innings is just as harsh as the ones McGrath
used to establish. Ignore the score; how am I supposed to make it through this?
There’s no chance if on the very first ball he produces the legbreak that did
for poor Pathum Nissanka, a fast and vicious one that beats his outside edge
and pins him to the pads. That ball had so many wonderful qualities, but none
more so than a length that is better expressed in words than in metres: you
couldn’t drive at it, you couldn’t hang back to it, and your only option was to
hope. Early in the tournament, new-ball champions Trent Boult, Mitchell Starc,
and Shaheen Afridi have had trouble with their lengths. Here, first ball, was
Bumrah finding the perfect one.
Like he did with Mitchell Marsh, he can also pick at a
batter’s approach and instincts like one does at a scab. Before a sixth ball
hooped in sharply to that fourth stump, back of a length, leaving Marsh unsure
of whether to play or not, there were five balls that were all good wheels and
sufficiently tight around that stump that Marsh had to play at four. Marsh,
who, after making a shot, never gives up, never gives in, never doubts, never
edges towards failure.
It is easy to see Bumrah as the result of all the
pushes and pulls that Indian cricket has experienced over the past thirty
years. The MRF Pace Academy, the Indian Premier League and its worldwide
impact, the infinite resources available to spend in players and
infrastructure. When Ashish Nehra struck 149 km/h in a World Cup twenty years
ago, it seemed like a turning point for India—it meant that they would no
longer be creating sincere right-arm engineers but rather competent fast
bowlers.
Bumrah? Truth be told, he’s no culmination of any
legacy and neither can he be the start of another. He isn’t, because no line
anywhere in the world leads to a Bumrah. He is an outlier, a dot all by itself
in the corner on that line graph of Indian pace; impossible to have imagined
into being until he arrived, impossible to replicate once he’s gone. If we’re
lucky, he might turn up as a whisper himself sometime deep in the future.