At the risk of sounding uncharitable, it was as if two games of cricket were taking place at the same time, from two different ends. India’s Jasprit Bumrah picked up his 14th five-wicket haul on Day 3 of the 1st Test match against England, at Headingley Cricket Ground(HT_PRINT) With Jasprit Bumrah in operation, every ball was an event, a spectacle from the time the pace ace started his walk-up, gradually ramped it up into a stutter and then attacked the bowling crease with explosive energy. Every time he released the little orb, the air was pregnant with the possibility of a wicket. He made the ball do wicked things – such as bowling from so wide of the crease from over the stumps and angling it into the right-hander with such finality that you couldn’t see the ball do anything else except head down the legside. Until it developed a mind of its own, began straightening and horror, oh horror, actually moved away from the bat. Defying convention, defying physics. This was from one end, the drama compelling, every blink of the eye an invitation to miss out on something otherworldly, spectacularly special. From the other end, with Mohammed Siraj and Prasidh Krishna, the release of pressure and tension was palpable. These aren’t unskilled bowlers – they can’t be, not when they are representing their country – but they are no Bumrah. No one is, when you break it down. But they weren’t even the best versions of themselves at Headingley in England’s first innings, and that hurt India. The Bumrah dependency is real Bumrah more than kept up his end of the bargain. Five for 83 from 24.4 wonderful overs that covered the entire gamut of his genius. Three and a half runs an over on a featherbed, a wicket every 30.4 deliveries. Between them, Siraj and Prasidh went at 5.32 runs to the over, producing a wicket once in 56.4 balls. If you said ‘stark contrast’, allow yourself a pat on the back. Bumrah should have got more than five wickets, or at the very least got those five wickets even quicker, had it not been for three dropped catches and a no-ball with which he had ‘dismissed’ Harry Brook on the second evening, for nought. He drove spectators, purists, commentators and everyone in both dressing rooms to the edges of their seat, subconsciously. People held their breath without realising. Out in the middle, for all their nonchalance, Ben Duckett and Ollie Pope and Brook found their hearts beating faster, their mouths dry in uncertainty. What was this champion going to unleash? With Prasidh and, to a lesser extent Siraj, the pressure was almost non-existent. At least one loose ball an over was a given, two weren’t out of the ordinary. There was no relentless examination, no unforgiving scrutiny. Sometimes, it isn’t great deliveries that bring wickets. Relentless accuracy and the drying up of runs can trigger the same outcome. That wasn’t the case with Bumrah’s pace colleagues on Saturday and Sunday. Worrying? Wait. It only gets worse. Bumrah will not play all five Tests on this tour, that’s practically written in stone. What happens to India then? How do they cope with Bazball, with the England top seven that has divorced itself from every negative bone in its collective body? How do they approach the onerous twin tasks of slowing down the rate of scoring and picking up wickets, knowing that there is no Bumrah to fall back on, that they (Siraj and Prasidh and maybe Akash Deep or Arshdeep Singh or Harshit Rana) and they alone must get the job done? How can England not be buoyed by the absence of their arch-nemesis? And, unless the Bumrah understudies somehow get their act together, how can this not be a long and unending summer for Shubman Gill, India’s new Test captain? Bumrah makes the other quicks – his teammates, even the most accomplished in the opposition – appear slightly more than commonplace. That’s the quality he possesses. “I also make mistakes, I am only human,” he said on Sunday evening. We wonder, Jasprit. We really do. With the magical Bumrah whirling away, England still scored at 4.61 runs for 100.4 overs in their first innings. Without him? It’s a scary, depressing, exciting, exhilarating, extraordinarily thrilling proposition. You know which adjectives belong in which camp, of course. Perhaps with the exception of Mohammed Shami, currently superfluous to India’s plans because of giant question marks over his fitness, the best of the rest of the Indian pace attack is here in England. It’s not as if India have left the next Kapil Dev, Javagal Srinath or Zaheer Khan behind at home. In Bumrah’s injury-enforced absence in the second innings of the Sydney Test in January, Siraj and Prasidh stepped up admirably. That was for half an innings; in England, they must do it for at least four. With the master watching from the outer. Palpitation time?
