PERTH, Nov 21: India’s strike weapon, with his unorthodox action and unusually forward release point, boasts a record to match almost any visiting paceman to these shores.
Travis Head could be describing a UFO crashing down to Earth.
“It fell out of the sky,” he says of the mysterious object that landed 20 metres from him on the MCG from the last ball before lunch on day three of the 2018 Boxing Day Test.
The reaction of Head’s batting partner Shaun Marsh after being hit by the unidentified object flush on the Gray-Nicholls logo of his front pad also suggested an extraterrestrial sighting; the veteran was left slumped chest-on to the bowler with both arms hanging down in front of him, his bat a bystander to the mystery.
“It was the best ball I’ve ever seen,” Head adds. “It literally looked like it was going to hit ‘Sos’ (Marsh) in the head – and then it hit him on the foot. That is the most incredible ball I’ve ever seen.”
Jasprit Bumrah’s sorcery has lived on in the Australians’ memory even as the idiosyncratic style of the stiff-limbed hurler from Gujarat has since been somewhat demystified, if not yet fully decrypted.
Back when he lobbed up that remarkable off-spinning dipper to Marsh, Bumrah was still in his first year of Test cricket, having successfully adapted the scattergun bowling style honed in a narrow carpark outside his childhood apartment in Ahmedabad to the IPL and then international limited-overs cricket.
It was said his devastating yorker had been perfected when he was a child practicing bowling to hit the skirting board at the end of the hallway in his family’s small flat on the full, muffling the noise of ball on wood so as not to wake his napping mother.
And the Australians discovered during that 2018-19 Test series, in which Bumrah’s series-leading 21-wicket haul inspired India’s breakthrough series victory, that the right-armer had persistence and variety to match his unorthodoxy.
“He runs in so slow and you think this guy could bowl 120 (kph), but he’s bowling 135 and then he has a quick ball that’s 150 – and he releases the ball further forward than every other bowler in the world,” says Marnus Labuschagne, who first faced Bumrah during the 2019 New Year’s Test.
As Bumrah blossomed into one of cricket’s most impactful all-format bowlers, it has been his release point that has been identified as the single most significant factor separating him from other leading seamers.
His braced front leg and hyperextension in his elbow allows him to catapult the ball from up to half-a-metre further in front of his body than other international pacemen, reducing the batter’s reaction time to what is an already unusual bowling action.
An analysis by Channel Seven during the 2020-21 series showed Bumrah was releasing the ball from 34cm in front of the bowling crease. Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood were both at less than 10cm, with Pat Cummins the furthest out of the Aussies at 22cm. Other breakdowns have shown Bumrah letting it go from as far as 48cm in front of the crease.
“If you haven’t faced him before, it can really unsettle you,” says fellow quick Josh Hazlewood. “He lets the ball go way out in front, so he’s pretty much half a yard quicker than what the actual speed gun says … He’s like a slingshot loading up and letting go.” (Agencies)
