The Jasprit Bumrah slower ball is a thing of beauty and a rarity. It’s not an everyday spectacle but when he does bring it out, the audience and the hapless victim of his sleight-of-hand sorcery are bemused and dazzled.
Bumrah’s action is made for slower balls, just as it is made for shoe-crushing yorkers. The run-up is short, whereupon the body explodes into the action. The elbow is hyper-extended. The natural release is in front of his body, which means he’s releasing the ball from six-seven inches closer to batsmen than most bowlers. All these chains of inter-related actions and quirks mean the batsman is crunched for reaction time to decode the change of pace.
The Bumrah slower ball forces a batsman to react against his own muscle memory. A batsman when facing a 145kph bowler is trained to react in less than 0.4 seconds, the time it takes for a ball’s journey across the pitch. But when the ball turns out to be much slower, the fully focused batsman has to realign himself.
During India’s tour to Australia in 2018, the ball that got Marsh was clocked at 114 kph. The ball before that was 140 kph. A difference of 20-26 kph is difficult to adjust to. The batsman’s shape goes off-kilter. Bumrah destabilises the batsman’s base, the footwork betrays panic and he ends up resembling a novice. One minute Bumrah is a heavy metal drums basher, the next he’s rendering a soulful sitar note.
Bumrah also has the nuanced art of disguise. He does not reduce the arm speed, doesn’t slow his action, he does not contort his wrist wickedly. He does not mess about with the seam either. There is no giveaway, no pattern, no algorithm, no AI tips. He gives only microscopic clues, like when bowling the slower ball, his palm faces skywards in the load-up rather than towards the side when he struts his seam-up balls. Besides, he holds the ball fractionally deeper. Sometimes, he gives the ball an extra tweak, like a spinner does. But from a batsman’s perch, it’s impossible to decode the variation. He has to gauge it in the air, or off the surface.
A master at work
Interestingly, Bumrah does not have a variety of slower balls, like the knuckleball, or the one delivered from the side of the hand. He mostly spews the off-cutter, fingers cutting the side to ensure that it loops in the air, and invariably cuts into a right-handed batsman.
The mastery of lengths and angles too kicks in. The Marsh one was on a full length on middle and off, floating and swerving in the air. The Rizwan and Smith ones in the World Cup were more good length, landing outside the off-stump. The Robinson one was from around the stumps, angling in and then breaking back like an off-spinner. The Foakes one was on the fuller side of the good-length patch.
Though, the biggest reason his slower balls are so effective could be that he uses them sparingly. The ball to Marsh was only the second slower one Bumrah had attempted in the Test series. He doesn’t need to resort to the slower one because he already has a quiver full of poison-tipped arrows. The genius lies in the awareness, wisdom and intuition to pick the right weapon at the right time.
Bumrah lays traps, sometimes double-bluffs too. Before the Marsh ball, he would bring the cover to short cover, making the batsman second-guess that he might bowl a tempter outside off-stump. Robinson was fed the slower ball after a barrage of bouncers with a leg-side heavy field.
For Foakes, he brought the mid-on and mid-off fielders slightly up, inviting him to drive. Most bowlers have a preferred length when bowling a specific delivery.
Bumrah is unspoiled by preferences. He can rip a slower ball from any length, because he is exemplary with different lengths.
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