Does Jasprit Bumrah have the best slower ball in world cricket now?

The Jasprit Bumrah slower ball is both a thing of beauty and a thing of rarity. It’s not an everyday, every-spell spectacle of his, but when he does, he leaves the audience, and that includes the hapless victim of his sleight-of-hand sorcery, both bemused and dazzled.

It’s a paradox that some of his best remembered deliveries of the fastest bowler his country has produced, have been his slower balls. None would grudge, because special deliveries are special deliveries, a moment you could watch forever, in isolation, or without context. The Marsh curveball; the Rizwan snapper; the Robinson gripper; Smith corker, or more recently in this series, the Rehan stunner or Foakes ripper. Just whisper the names of those shocked batsmen and the deliveries simply play in your mind’s reel, each rewind unravelling a fresh, unseen dimension of the delivery.

It is as though Bumrah’s action is made for slower balls, just as it is made for shoe-crushing yorkers. The run-up is short, whereupon the body explodes into the action. The elbow is hyper-extended. The natural release is in front of his body, which means he is releasing the ball six-seven inches closer to the batsman than most bowlers. All these chains of inter-related actions and quirks mean the batsman is crunched for reaction time to decode the change of pace.

The Bumrah slower ball forces them to react against their own reactions and muscle memory. A batsman when facing a 145kph bowler is trained to react in less than .4 seconds, the time it takes for a ball’s journey from the bowler’s finger-tips to the batsman. With Bumrah, he expects at least 140 kph, and then Bumrah suspends both time and belief, shaping both in his will. The ball before he fixed Shaun Marsh clocked 140kph, the one that befuddled him nudged 114kph. The Rizwan one was 122. A difference of 20-26kph is not too dramatic. There are those that could instigate a more pronounced reduction of pace. Here is his subtlety within subtlety. He once likened his drop of pace to a spinner’s, subtle and not striking.

Nonetheless, any drop in pace is hard to adjust, even more so from someone bowling in excess of 140kph with a slingshot action, who conveys an impression that he is bowling a couple of yards faster than he actually is. The batsman’s shape goes off-kilter. He has to adjust his adjustments. Everything is a blur. Bumrah destabilizes the batsman’s base, hyper-panic kicks in, and the batsman ends up resembling a novice. Either way, he is looking to defeat the reaction of a batsman. Often with speed, and sometimes with speed-reduction. He is akin to a heavy metal drums basher rendering a soulful note on a sitar.

What nature has bestowed, Bumrah has nurtured. He has nuanced the art of disguise. He does not reduce the arm speed, he doesn’t slow his action, he does not contort his wrist wickedly. He does not mess about with the seam either, unlike say Cummins who bowls with a scrambled seam or most of the slower-ball merchants that grip the ball between a widespread index finger and thumb.

There is no giveaway, no pattern, no algorithm, no AI tips. He gives only microscopic clues, like when bowling the slower balls, his palm face skywards in the load-up rather than towards the side as when he struts his seam-up balls. Besides, he holds the ball fractionally deeper in his palms. Sometimes, he gives the ball an extra tweak, like a spinner does. But from a batsman’s perch, it’s impossible to encrypt the variation. He has to gauge it in the air, or off the surface.

Interestingly, Bumrah does not have a variety of slower balls, like the knuckleball, or the one delivered from the side of the hand. He mostly spews the off-cutter, fingers cutting the side to ensure that it loops in the air, and invariably cutting into the right-handed batsman.

The mastery of lengths and angles too kicks in. The Marsh one was full length on middle and off, floating and swerving in the air; the Rizwan and Steve Smith ones in the world cup were more good length landing outside the off-stump, the Robinson one was from around the stumps, angling in and then breaking back like an off-spinner breaking the ball into the pads of a right-hander from around the stumps, the ball gripping off the surface that it did for any other spinner in that game; the Ben Foakes one was on the fuller side of the good-length patch.

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He lays traps too, sometimes double-bluffs too. Before the Marsh ball he would bring the cover to short cover, making the batsman second-guess that he might bowl a tempter outside the off-stump. Robinson was fed the slower ball after a barrage of bouncers and a leg-side heavy field. For Foakes, he brought the mid-on and mid-off fielders slightly up, inviting him to drive. Most bowlers have a preferred length when bowling a specific delivery. Bumrah is unspoiled by preferences. He can rip a slower ball from any length, because he is exemplary with different lengths.

The different lengths perhaps account for the different effects his similarly-released slower balls generate. The Marsh one, a full toss, travelled more air and hence it curled and dipped. The Ahmedabad deck had more grip on the surface, and hence the exaggerated cut-back.

But the biggest reason his slower balls are so effective could be that he uses them sparingly. Not as a last-ditch weapon, not as a go-to tool, but only when he sniffs that there is an opportunity. The Marsh howitzer was the last ball before lunch, and only the second slower he had attempted thus far in the Test series; Robinson’s was when he was resisting India’s victory march, Foakes’s was just about the time he was taking the game away on an unresponsive pitch. He perhaps doesn’t need to resort to the slower because he already has a quiver full of poisoned tipped arrows. The natural in-swinger, the acquired away-swinger, the bouncer and yorker. The genius lies in the awareness, wisdom and intuition to pick the right weapon at the right time. Bumrah infallibly does this.

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