Since his comeback from a stress fracture in early 2020, his shorter deliveries have not brought as much reward
Shiva Jayaraman09-Jan-2022That was the ESPNcricinfo ball-by-ball commentary when Jasprit Bumrah hit Dean Elgar with a bouncer in the Johannesburg Test.You would have expected no less from Bumrah on a pitch with as much up-and-down bounce as that one. Over the past few years, Bumrah has troubled many batters in a similar manner, courtesy his hyper-extended elbow and delayed release point.Of course, Bumrah is much more than his freak anatomy. He is smart. He is incredibly skilled. If you are in any doubt, watch his slow yorker to Shaun Marsh at the MCG in 2018. Or his spell in the second innings of the Antigua Test in 2018, where he took 5 for 7, swinging the ball both ways. With an action tailor-made to swing the ball in to right handers, he had learnt to make the ball leave them in the air as well. In just two years of playing Test cricket. Most bowlers take years to swing the ball both ways.However, something is amiss at the moment.Related
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After all, you don’t expect a bowler of Bumrah’s calibre to not take a single wicket from 17 overs on a pitch with as much uneven bounce as in Johannesburg, especially in the second innings. He did beat the bat often enough to have picked up more wickets. But he didn’t. All he got was one wicket in the whole Test from 38 overs? And he is a bowler who strikes every 50 balls.But a bit of digging gives us surprising results. Of the seven fast bowlers in the Johannesburg Test – barring Mohammed Siraj who hurt his hamstring in the first innings and didn’t bowl at full pelt thereafter – Bumrah caused the least trouble to batters with deliveries that were pitched shorter than good length. According to ESPNcricinfo’s length data, Bumrah induced false shots in 20 balls out of the 101 (19.8%) he bowled on short or short-of-good-length areas in the Test. Shardul Thakur comes in next, inducing false shots 22% of the time. Mohammed Shami was at 23.5%. Expectedly, the South Africa bowlers were a lot more difficult to handle with their higher points of release owing to their heights.The more surprising fact was that this Test wasn’t an exception for Bumrah.Ever since his comeback after the stress fracture in February 2020, Bumrah has been less threatening with his short balls according to our data. Prior to the injury, Bumrah induced false shots off 26.3% of deliveries that he pitched shorter than on good length against batters in the top seven in Tests. Since his return, that percentage has come down to 17%. That’s a drop of a whopping 35.4% – from troubling top-order batters once every 3.8 balls before injury to once every 5.9 balls since. The trendline in the chart below shows how his short balls have become increasingly less threatening. The inflection point – to apply the term loosely – came in the first Test on his return from injury, in Wellington. This was the least he has troubled batters with short balls – only three out 39 he bowled shorter than good length troubled the batters. Perhaps the pitch was flat and perhaps Bumrah, understandably so, wasn’t at his best.