Roberts b Bumrah; Ambrose b Bumrah: What fast bowling legends thought of an epic spell

Like most of the audience, batsmen and former players, or for that matter anyone that has cast his eyes on Bumrah, it was his unusual action that stokes the Antiguan’s curiosity — just how untamed the delivery stride is. “Look, he has no rhythm. He just takes a few steps — how many? Eight, or is it nine?— and then he just explodes at the crease. There is no rhythm,” he observes.

By saying he has no rhythm, he doesn’t mean Bumrah is unrhythmic. But just that his rhythm is different, something batsmen are unused to.

Jasprit Bumrah celebrates after taking the wicket of John Campbell on Day 4 in Antigua on Sunday (AP Photo)

“When a bowler is running in, you should look at the batsmen. They are settling into a mental rhythm of their own in their mind. They are visualising the bowler, his action, the leap, the load-up, the release and things like that. Their thought processes are conditioned in such a way that if he’s a side-on bowler, the ball will come like that, if’s high-arm it would come in a different way. Or the longer the run-up, the quicker the ball will be. With Bumrah, the batsmen have little time to get into their mental rhythm,” he explains.

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Naturally, everything else falls apart. The batsman’s judgment, technique and plans. And Bumrah, Roberts reckons, operates at a straighter line than most other bowlers. “There’s no bend. He’s coming straight, bowling straight. He doesn’t bend his body in the run-up or during the release. And then he bends the ball. Like I said before it puts off the batsmen, mainly because his action is unique, they’ve never probably played someone like him. I would like to see how some of the Indian batsmen play him at the nets. Someone like Virat Kohli or Cheteshwar Pujara, how they deal with him. I am sure it wouldn’t be easy nets for them. Or, maybe, Sunny Gavaskar.”

Andy Roberts

Quite like Bumrah’s unorthodox action, his orthodox methods, too, have the West Indian great in the young Indian’s awe. “Look at everything else he does, he’s classical. He moves two balls into the batsmen, and the other one goes away. Then two away from him, and then one into him. This is how we did, this is how fast bowlers have operated over the years. But the best one knows how, where and when to bowl. And Bumrah seems to have this awareness, which usually takes a lot of time to develop, a lot of experience. But how old is he? How many Tests has he played? He’s a quick learner, isn’t he?”

For Roberts, it took him several years and injuries to transform from a tearaway into a cerebral bowler. He compromised on pace but sharpened the craft. But Bumrah, he feels, has that maturity at such a young stage of his career.

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“To me, it has been the most striking feature of him. Some call it maturity. I call it game sense. There seems to be clarity in his thinking, and that automatically shows in his bowling. Some bowlers, very skilful ones, don’t develop it even 10 years after they had played the game. That’s the biggest thing for a fast bowler, to learn how to use your head.”

His bewilderment only grows as he sees Bumrah smiling at a batsman after beating him all ends up: “How can you smile at him? I mean you needn’t be nasty, but to smile at him! I could never imagine it.”

Roberts smiles wistfully and mutters, almost like an aside. “He’s a freak,” before he elaborates: “They use the word freak carelessly. Anything you haven’t seen or experienced is a freak. But Bumrah is the closest cricketer to the exact meaning of the word,” says Roberts, as he resumes his Bumrah-reverie, his fingers tapping on the table in accordance to Bumrah’s strides. Tip, tap, tip tap… And then Bumrah explodes.

***

Curtly Ambrose was as aggressive as fast bowlers came, pounding his beanpole frame into the ground and launching projectiles from the skies — so it seemed to batsmen. The golden chain around his neck would dance and glitter in the sun, the round eyes would generate as much dread as his rip-snorters, and the high-octane celebrations would cause the batsman as much hurt as the delivery that had crashed into his stumps.

Bumrah is just the opposite, genial and relaxed, calm and smiling, exuding nothing of the theatrics fast bowlers are prone to. He doesn’t look to maim batsmen. Nonetheless, Ambrose feels he’s the most aggressive bowler around. He explains: “I’m not talking about body language here. I’m not talking about being hostile. Aggression is not always about what you show outwards. Some show, some don’t. It depends on the individual’s nature. To me, it’s about how you bowl, the aggression of the delivery. And Bumrah shows a lot of it.”

In other words, he’s communicating his aggression through his deliveries and not necessarily through his actions. The spell on Sunday evening, which triggered a dramatic if not unprecedented West Indies collapse, was enchantingly aggressive. And like Ambrose in Perth in 1993, when he extracted terrifying bounce from a supersonic strip on his way to the memorable seven-wickets-one-run spell, Bumrah, who took five wickets for seven runs, was in an inspirational mood, his remorselessly precise line snuffing out their scoring shots and the spectre of his outswingers and inswingers kindling their insecurity. And like when Ambrose was on a roll, he skittled out the West Indies batsmen in a plundering spell, where he seemed as much unplayable as indecipherable. That’s what the best ones do. “They waste no time,” as Ambrose puts it.

But the North Sound strip was no Perth, it was placid, if not slow. It was, in West Indies skipper Jason Holder’s words, “not a wicket where bowlers can blast batsmen”. But blast Bumrah did, and Ambrose was hardly surprised. Days before the Test match, during India’s warm-up game at the Coolidge Ground, he had sensed it. Bumrah had an indifferent outing — his first spell bleeding 30 runs in 7 overs — but Ambrose didn’t read too much into it.

“The West Indies pitches have become slower. But if you have pace and the ability to get seam movement, you could still be a handful. A pitch is sometimes what a bowler makes it look like. But one bowler who could run through batsmen is Bumrah. Give him any pitch, if he’s at his best, he can make batsmen out there very uncomfortable,” he says.

It’s Bumrah’s mastery of different lengths that has impressed him the most. “He’s good at varying his lengths, depending on the surfaces and batsmen. I saw that in the World Cup, how he adjusted (and altered) his lengths according to the conditions and batsmen. That makes life difficult for batsmen.”

In the first innings here, he bowled more back-of-length, as the surface had bounce. But by the time West Indies’s second innings had rolled out, the surface had eased out. So he sought a fuller length, at hurtling pace, moving the ball both ways.

“(In this regard), he reminds me a bit of Courtney (Walsh) a bit. He was wonderful in sizing up the length and bowling accordingly.”

He might not be as wince-inducing as Ambrose was, but Bumrah certainly could be as devastating and, in his own way, aggressive. Aggression curled beneath his beaming smile.

There could be no bigger appraisal for a young fast bowler from a legendary one than this: “He’s someone who I admire.”