Bumrah did Bumrah things. Australia wobbled. Catches went down. Australia rallied. And, to close things out, Bumrah overstepped. It was a day of promise and pain for India and their relentless spearhead
Alagappan Muthu29-Dec-20241:34
Are India bowling Bumrah into the ground?
Jasprit Bumrah buckled.He was the only one still pitch side. Everybody had left. He wasn’t moving.One-hundred and forty overs in the series. Nine spells in the day. Bumrah had shouldered that burden like it was nothing. He kept pushing himself and pushing himself – because his team needed him, and he often answers that call – and he ended up overstepping. Nathan Lyon, instead of becoming the final Australian wicket to fall, hit him for four to end play.Related
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Bumrah slowed down in his follow through. He came to a full stop halfway down the pitch, just off to the left, dropped both of his hands down to his knees and just stood there, slumped over.It took a while for India to notice something was off. Nitish Kumar Reddy was the first to do so. He went up to the umpires, who had also begun to make their way off the field, to collect his team-mate’s cap and glasses. KL Rahul then came over. Rishabh Pant too. And Mohammed Siraj. All of them had reason to believe things might have turned out differently.India had Australia at 91 for 6 at the MCG.Bumrah, in his second over, made sure they couldn’t touch half the balls he bowled. In the next one, he lined ’em up. And Usman Khawaja was beaten back to back to back.One good ball just wouldn’t do.Jasprit Bumrah put in quite a shift on day four at the MCG•Quinn Rooney/Getty ImagesRohit Sharma wound his bowlers up with everything from sweet talk to telling offs. On his way back to first slip after these conversations, he would obsess over his field, pulling cover straighter, or midwicket closer. Once, he pointed at the exact spot where he wanted silly point to be.Everything had to be perfect. Marnus Labuschagne and Rahul could have shook hands if they weren’t so distracted by playing some of the best cricket seen in ages.Virat Kohli was liberal with his thoughts about various field placements. There was constant chatter between the former captain and the current one. One of those chats took place as Kohli traced a curious right-angle path from leg slip to Rohit at first slip. It brought him almost face to face with Khawaja who was walking off towards square leg in between deliveries.India didn’t want the batter getting any respite.But it did come. Australia’s last four wickets added 137 runs to push their lead up to 333. Their No. 10 and 11 enjoyed five straight overs of spin towards the end of the day on a pitch barely taking any. Their top-scorer could’ve been dismissed for 46 instead of 70. Their first (of two) fifty-run stand of the innings would never have happened if Yashasvi Jaiswal had been a little more alert at gully.
There was a level of performance that India expected of themselves on the fourth day of the Boxing Day Test. It doesn’t really have a word for it. Perfection feels a sterile description, particularly because so much of it was driven by emotion. A compulsion to fight. A desperation to win.
Rohit saw it all happen and couldn’t hide his frustration. He spun off to the side and slapped the air. Jaiswal once again had a chance to dismiss Pat Cummins for 21 but couldn’t hold on. Rohit spun off to the side once more with his eyes screwed shut and his hands on his head. He’d teased Jaiswal about not staying low enough at bad-pad positions earlier in the series. Even if he had stayed low here, it wouldn’t have been easy to take it. The ball came pretty quickly to Jaiswal, right off the middle of Cummins’ bat, but creating and converting half chances were India’s way back into this Test match and they seemed so up for it.They made an important tactical change.Akash Deep has been generating false shots more frequently than any bowler on this tour. Thirty per cent of his deliveries have put the batter in trouble, which is more than even Bumrah (29%). So India gave him the new ball. The pressure the two of them created made Australia take chances against the first-change bowler, Siraj.Khawaja tried to drive him on the up and got bowled. There was a little bit of skill involved here, a set up where the left-hander was conditioned to the wobble seam going away from him, and then all of a sudden one straightened against the angle. Steven Smith tried to smash him as well but this time a little bit of extra bounce took the ball past the middle of the bat and instead took the top edge through to the keeper. Siraj has been averaging 33.3 over the first seven innings of this series. With a little help from his friends – and the opposition – he brought that number down to 22.Usman Khawaja was given a life by Yashasvi Jaiswal early on•AFP/Getty ImagesThe crowd at the MCG was only half as strong as the previous three days – 43,867 – but a majority of them were in India blue. So this time Siraj didn’t get booed (as much). He got chants. “D-S-P! D-S-P! D-S-P” Following India’s victory at the T20 World Cup earlier this year, Siraj was offered a government post by the chief minister of Telangana. He was, officially, a Deputy Superintendent of Police.There was a level of performance that India expected of themselves on the fourth day of the Boxing Day Test. It doesn’t really have a word for it. Perfection feels a sterile description, particularly because so much of it was driven by emotion. A compulsion to fight. A desperation to win. And many perceived injustices to set right. Sam Konstas had riled the crowd up against India so Bumrah knocked him over and celebrated it by mimicking his hand-waving. Siraj asked Australia to shush when he struck for the first time. Travis Head was given zero room to work with. He was also bounced first ball.For two sessions, they were as good as can be. And then, for some reason, one of their best bowlers in the game couldn’t bowl until the last 15 minutes, and those two overs seemed like a last resort. Akash Deep rapped Scott Boland on the pads with his first ball of the final session but the ball was just missing leg stump. Their catching let them down. And right at the very end came that gut-punch. Their best bowler, their world-beater securing the mistake they needed to get that last wicket – his fifth wicket – and end the day on a high… only for it to happen off a no-ball.One of many standout things about Bumrah is that he plays with a smile on his face. Hopefully someone’s been able to put it back in place, because there’s still one more day of this Test left and it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he’ll be out there deciding the course it takes.
