The hour after lunch would exist as a lurid fever dream in the mind of 35,000-odd spectators at the Eden Gardens. Barely had they settled into the pale green plastic chairs, grabbing their hurried bites and stifling the yawns, than two sleight-of-hand virtuosos conjured a fleeting sense of madness and left them under a spell. When they try to reconstruct the day, they would be left with images and impressions, memories and moments. Of Jasprit Bumrah smiling wickedly; of Kuldeep Yadav blowing his cheeks after another almost-wicket ball; of the abraded red ball swerving and spinning, the bats quivering, of appeals cutting through the pre-wintry air and the cinematic wonderment that had seized them.
The most telling blows were delivered in the first session; Bumrah wrinkled out Ryan Rickleton and Aiden Markram to stall South Africa’s Bazball-esque start; Kuldeep ejected Temba Bavuma with a drifting beauty. But it was here, in the post-lunch session, that they unfurled the full bag of tricks. Bumrah strolled in with the cunning smile of a master jewel thief who has already pulled off so many seemingly impossible heists that the latest exhibition was just another show. He swung, reverse-swung, and seamed the ball; he displayed his maddening mastery of length, from yorkers and short balls to off-cutters and heavy balls.
Kuldeep ripped and spun the ball; his pliant wrists made them traverse the straight lines; the flighted balls drifted and danced, the flat ones whirred and whooshed. Some hurried the batsmen; some staggered their reflexes. South Africa’s batsmen would have felt that they had been transported into a dark arts realm, facing superhuman bowlers and not two simple smiling assassins from Ahmedabad and Kanpur.
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Kuldeep, wearing the impish grin of a street sorcerer dealt the first blow of the session. Wiaan Mulder had little inkling of his variations. He couldn’t decipher the discreetly disguised variations from his arm; he was not quick enough to decode from the pitch either. He blindly hung on the back foot and trusted fortune and instincts rather than methods. An ill-advised reverse sweep, a shot in the dark, ended his tortured stay. From an over-the-wicket line,
Kuldeep kept everything within the stumps that if the batsman missed the ball, as Mulder did, he would be a sureshot lbw candidate. A similar trajectory had yielded him his first wicket of the day, too, of Bavuma. The away-drift hypnotised Bavuma, whose eyes simply froze as the ball spun back a trifle to kiss his bat’s edge and offer a low catch to Dhruv Jurel at leg-slip.
Next struck Bumrah, blasting the pads of Tony de Zorzi, who Kuldeep would have dismissed a half a dozen times with more favourable stars. Kuldeep had him mis-hitting, miscuing, and mis-sweeping, but he was meant to be Bumrah’s prey. The wicket ball was routine stuff; the back-of-length angler from around the stumps that De Zorzi missed. The beauty often lies in the build-up, the event leading to the events. He had roughened him up with reverse-swing aided full balls that bent away. De Zorzi’s mind could only see the ball decking away from him.
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The expectations heightened to such a degree that the audience was expecting the magical, on every ball. Chewing their nails, eyes fixed singularly on the leather projectile, the hearts pounding, they soaked in every ball and moment. Bumrah almost reprised the Ollie Pope heat-seeker at Oval, Kyle Verreynne saved only by the thinnest angle, taking the ball down the leg-side. He had Tristan Stubbs groping; Verreynne hopping like a rabbit. The figures of 5-0-14-0 were not as flattering as his first spell (7-4-9-2), but Bumrah was at his imaginative best in his second burst, when the bowler with the most rhythmless action, as Andy Roberts once observed, was at his most rhythmic.
Not that the first or third spell, both mustering a brace of wickets, were any less spectacular. He cycled through the three spells with uniform mastery. If the third was about knocking off the lower-order and completing a five-for, the first was about breaking South Africa’s resistance. He sculpted a pair of bewildering beauties to put India back into the game after the breezy start of 57 in 10 overs. He deceived the left-handed Rickleton with an inch-perfect missile that straightened after landing and trimmed the bails. He then devoured Aiden Markram with a brutish lifter.
The short ball is arguably the most devilish of Jasprit Bumrah’s deliveries, more incomprehensible than his yorker or that famous slower ball. The mechanics of his action make it difficult for batsmen to line up for his rib-ticklers. His right arm is high, but not high enough for them to expect a short ball. It moves unlike any other human arm, it twists around him, the arm stretches and elongates like the stiff hand of a windmill, the shoulders tilt and the ball is delivered from directly above his slanted head. The elbow hyper-extends, delaying the release for a vital fraction of a second. The release point constantly shifts across the crease, making it difficult for them to pin down his release points.
For batsmen, it could be like looking into the sun; unusual patterns flicker in front of you. From such an action, the batsmen’s reflexes are trained to counter a hard-length ball angling in. The batsman is already so committed to blocking the ball at a certain height that he can’t withdraw his bat if it bounces even half an inch more. How did he edge it, or get into the tangle? Not even Markram, or his executioner Bumrah, could fully narrate. It was that kind of a day, one of impressions and images, of two sleight-of-hand virtuosos transporting the Eden Friday into a magical realm.
