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As a child, one’s earliest infatuation point with cricket inevitably involves the bowling action of a fast bowler. Few can claim to have grown up loving the sport and not have stories to tell of their efforts to perfect the action of a bowler they idolised.
Shoaib Akhtar’s marauding run-up, Curtly Ambrose’s loading of arm, Darren Gough’s delivery stride, or Dale Steyn’s impeccable release – kids on streets spend years mimicking this to perfection, only to realise the impression itself doesn’t quite do the job.
The end result turns out to be so mediocre, the romanticised notion immediately shatters. It was all pretty and lovely in their imagination. But you were not really your heroes. Nothing close.
And yet, despite this rather crushing reality check, the obsession with emulating fast bowlers never quite wears down. After all, it’s the visual appeal of the art that makes fast bowling so captivating.
And then comes in Jasprit Bumrah. The Indian pace spearhead operates in his own way. While few can doubt the pedigree, Bumrah hasn’t quite graduated from the school of fast bowling that young boys on the streets obsess over. You watch him go about his business and cannot help but think he was hell-bent on subverting the inherent charm associated with the art.
Bumrah’s action can be described as the perfect antidote to the aesthetics of fast bowling. And that’s being quite generous. At no point in his run-up, does he actually run. He briskly walks, takes a couple of jittery hops, opens his arms wide and almost jerks the ball out of his hand as opposed to releasing it. The non-bowling arm points to the first slip creating an impossible angle for batsmen to deal with where everything seems coming in to them. The action makes Bumrah a practically impossible bowler to leave no matter how certain one is of his off-stump.
Though Bumrah had played substantial amount of first-class cricket before making his Test debut in early 2018, he was largely being seen as a limited-overs specialist up until that point. And it wasn’t for no reason. The angle that he so much relied on allowed him to relentlessly attack the stumps but it was hard to think of him developing a ball leaving the right-hander – a skill absolutely crucial for a bowler to crack Test cricket.