Jasprit Bumrah held his nerve on a stressful night and, although he went relatively unnoticed, that helped to pave the way to India’s win
Karthik Krishnaswamy23-Mar-20162:15
Match Day: Bumrah showed mental toughness
Fine leg, first over, first ball of the innings. A clip around the corner, a routine stop. Jasprit Bumrah runs around, bends down, lets the ball come to him, and lets it slip through his fingers and roll into the boundary cushions.Short fine leg, fifth over of the innings. An offbreak that turns and jumps, a top-edged sweep. Bumrah steadies himself under the ball, lets it fall into his hands, and sees it bounce out.Other cricketers might slump to the earth, swear at themselves, kick the ground, or fling their caps away. Bumrah just stands there, staring straight ahead. He always wears a quiet and earnest expression, and it doesn’t really change that much.But the same expression can take on entirely different meanings in different situations, as the Russian filmmaker Lev Kuleshov demonstrated a century ago, with the same shot of an expressionless actor juxtaposed in turn against shots of a bowl of soup, a child in a coffin, and a woman sprawled languorously on a couch.Bumrah stares straight ahead, quietly and earnestly.Tamim Iqbal is the beneficiary of both the misfield and the dropped catch. It is Bumrah’s fate to bowl the next over, and Tamim charges him first ball, gets a bit of width, and slaps him away through point. Then he opens his shoulders to a full ball and pastes it down the ground for another four. Last ball of the over, he jumps out of his crease again. It’s a shortish ball that cramps him for room and hurries him. The attempted pull shoots in an unintended direction, through the off side. But the unintended direction is a gap, between short extra cover and mid-off. Four more.Sixteen runs come off that over, the sixth of Bangladesh’s innings, and they are 45 for 1 at the end of it. They are nicely on course for their target of 147.The misfield, the dropped catch, and the streaky off-side pull are emblematic of a match where cause and consequence are hard to match up. Over the next few overs, Sabbir Rahman grabs 26 off 15 balls with nearly every run coming off the edges of his bat. R Ashwin drops a catch running in from sweeper cover. Mashrafe Mortaza and Shakib Al Hasan swat a couple of sixes. A couple of wickets go down as well, but everything else seems to be falling Bangladesh’s way.At the 12-over mark, they need 52 off 48 balls with six wickets in hand. Easy-peasy.The first act of redemption is Ashwin’s: an over of jaw-dropping quality, an over of flight, dip and vicious turn. He gets Shakib caught at slip first ball, an outside edge from a forward defensive in a T20 match. Then he rips the ball past Soumya Sarkar’s bat three times in four balls.Fifty two from 48 is now 51 from 42. Not so easy-peasy now.The equation is down to 34 from 24, with five wickets in hand, when Bumrah comes back into the attack. His figures, at this point, are 2-0-19-0.Bumrah. Gangly, awkward Bumrah with the quiet, earnest expression. He is a good bowler, hits the deck and cramps the right-handers with awkward bounce. At the death he can bowl the yorker. Against New Zealand, he bowled five of them in a row, three to the left-handed Corey Anderson, the third ripping out middle stump, and two to the right-handed Grant Elliott.But India were bowling first that day, and New Zealand were stuttering on a difficult pitch. Now the scoreboard favours Bangladesh, and Bumrah is coming back from a misfield, a spilled sitter and an expensive second over.The first ball is very full, though not quite in the blockhole, and Sarkar clips it away for two. Sarkar makes room next ball, exposes his stumps, and has to plonk his bat down in a hurry to protect them from a pinpoint yorker and squeeze the ball away for a single. The out-of-form opener, demoted to No. 7, is now off strike. On strike now is the fluent, in-form Mahmudullah.Bumrah spears in another yorker, the best of the over, angling in and denying room to a batsman who likes to open his bat face and steer the ball either side of point. All Mahmudullah can do is jam his bat down and stop the ball from hitting the stumps.The next ball is in the blockhole again, but just a touch wider, and it is a reminder to Bumrah of the minimal margin for error. Mahmudullah angles his bat face just so, and a sprawling Yuvraj Singh, diving from backward point, manages to get a fingertip to it and deflect it towards the fielder at sweeper cover and keep it down to two runs.Next ball, Mahmudullah doesn’t give himself room. He steps across his stumps instead, looking for the gaps either side of or over short fine leg. Bumrah’s missile homes in on the base of off stump, and doesn’t give the batsman any angle to work with. Mahmudullah manufactures a whipped single through square leg.Last ball of the over, and Bumrah zeroes in on the blockhole again. Sarkar tries to use the angle across him to steer the ball past short third man. He only gets a glancing touch on it, and MS Dhoni, diving to his left, can’t take the catch behind the wicket.Still, only seven from the over, and Bumrah has kept India in the game. Bangladesh need 27 from the last three overs. Ashish Nehra gives them only six from his first five balls, but Mahmudullah, calm, crisp Mahmudullah, puts the last one away, an inch-perfect drive to the right of sweeper cover.It is now down to 17 off the last 12 balls. Here is Bumrah again.The yorker is a difficult ball to bowl. Overpitch it, it’s a full-toss. Underpitch it, it’s a half-volley. And that’s with a batsman standing still. A batsman moving away from his stumps or across them, stepping down the pitch or deep into his crease, is another variable entirely.The yorker also takes a lot of effort, an extra thrust of taut arm and tiring shoulder.For all these reasons, Bumrah’s fourth over isn’t as good as his third. But if he overpitches, he only does so to the extent of bowling hard-to-hit low full-tosses. If he underpitches, he still bowls it full enough to deny any elevation or room for a full, free swing of the bat. He sends down six balls, all there or thereabouts, and gives away six singles. It is not the perfect over, but it’s a bloody good one.Bumrah finishes with figures of 4-0-32-0. They are unremarkable at first glance, even ordinary, and they do not say anything about the match he has had. They do not reveal how he has kept India in the game. Neither does his face. On it, as always, is a quiet and earnest expression.