Jasprit times call for Jasprit measures. Lord’s on a brutally hot July morning can feel like an assault on the senses, with its crush of pastel-shirted flesh, the walkways seething with food wafts, hamper-flash, ice-bucket envy.
The home of cricket had at least immersed itself fully in the Red for Ruth charity on day two of this third Test, laying on an endless rolling field of red trouser cloth, every shade from faded salmon to screw-you scarlet on show. Admittedly it was like this on day one too. But you can never have enough charity.
Above all Lord’s has a kind of social fever on days like these, the shared urge to get beyond the next velvet rope, to find the furthest secret garden, like supplicants at some blue-moccasined royal court.
In the middle of this there was something beautifully stark about the sight of Jasprit Bumrah out in the middle of that sun-baked green oval, a cricketer operating from inside his own cold clean square of light. With a Test to be seized and a legacy to be glossed, Bumrah duly produced, taking three for one in six balls in his opening spell, completing the scheduled five-fer, and in the process his own ascent to the panelled wall coverings of St John’s Wood.
Mainly, Bumrah at Lord’s was just utterly thrilling to watch. As ever he came stuttering in like a man on an imaginary pantomime horse clopping his own coconut halves, bowling leg-cutters, inswing and throat-searing bouncers with no shift of action or grip. In the process India’s premier seamer justified even further the decision to rest him for the win in Leeds. And also confirmed what seems now to be unavoidably true: that he is, on numbers, skill and pure spectacle, perhaps the greatest fast bowler of all time; and certainly the best yet across the three modern formats.
Bumrah didn’t really produce anything out of the ordinary here. There is no need when your ordinary is sui generis brilliance on all surfaces, all formats, all conditions, the portable Bumrah-shaped universe. A final haul of five for 74 in 27 overs offered the guilty pleasure, mid-Test, of poring over that career record once again.
Bumrah now has 215 wickets at an average below 19.5, the lowest of anyone ever to take 200 or more, at least at this stage in his career. Basically right now it’s just Bumrah and SF Barnes out there running ahead of the tideline, with only Malcolm Marshall, Joel Garner and Curtly Ambrose anywhere near.
There are odd elements to these numbers. Bumrah has played only 12 home Tests (his record would be better with more: he averages 17 in India) compared with 34 away from home. He’s also getting better. In the last two years he has 87 Test wickets at 15. In November in Perth he basically pulled Marnus Labuschagne apart like a curious child taking the tweezers to a desiccated woodlouse, en route to five for 10 in nine overs, surely the most relentlessly magical fast bowling spell of the modern age.
We can say it now. This is unique, next-level stuff, all the more striking because Bumrah is, that rarest of all things, a mystery fast bowler, out there operating in a field of one. At Lord’s it was a day to marvel at how he does it.
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Essentially Bumrah is all about that malevolently skilled right arm. The run-up is still a vital source of rhythm and timing, for all its stutters and starts, the ball carefully cradled, like a man running for the last bus at 3am with a kebab doggedly lodged under his elbow. But the run-up exists to wheel that hyperextending right arm into place, wrist perfectly coiled, head still.
There’s a glide and a gather and a self-catapult through the crease, ending in the follow-through with Bumrah’s right hand slapping his own buttocks between his legs. It is of course no surprise that growing up in Ahmedabad he was at first unable to break into the age-group teams due to the self-made oddity of this action. Equally unsurprising, it didn’t last long. Above all Bumrah is just a super-smart cricketer, a sponge for information, a student of lines and angles, always in control, jarringly happy in his work, and more muscled now in his pomp, with the look of the handsome contented man in a barber shop window advert.
Three of his five wickets in England’s first innings here were top order batters clean bowled – Joe Root, Harry Brook and Ben Stokes, numbers one and two in the world plus the skipper. These were genuinely clean bowled too, defensive shots beaten, techniques pulled apart. Stokes was first to go in Bumrah’s second over, off stump clanked back by a ball angled in on a perfect not-quite length. Next, Root was bowled middle stump via the same process: angled in, holds its line, too flat, quick, perfectly pitched.
Chris Woakes nicked behind. Finally Jofra Archer was also bowled, and also seemed to lose the length, completely outmanoeuvred by that snaking, fizzing trajectory. In between Bumrah was slapped around a little by Brydon Carse, who batted with heart and skill to take England to a promising 387. But this was Bumrah’s morning, Bumrah’s asterisk, his one-man Lord’s Friday matinee.
