Cricket World Cup: Jasprit Bumrah & Mohammed Shami add their names to l including Lillee-Thomson, Wasim-Waqar, Ambrose-Walsh, Anderson-Broad with demolition job on England top order | Cricket-world-cup News

Twinning a pair of fast bowlers is cricket’s favourite old pastime. Roll up the shutters of memory, and the names rumble down. Thommo and Lillee, Wasim and Waqar, Walsh and Ambrose, Trueman and Statham, Holding and Roberts, Anderson and Broad. Breathed never with their full names, but with just the first one or surnames, or even the nicknames, or the more fashionable portmanteau, somehow, their feats seem collective, their aura blazing like conjoined twins. Even though their individual records are worthy of standalone stature, somehow one feels less complete without the other. One gives the other absolute perfection.
Like it is with Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammed Shami, a thrilling pair of contrasts and similarities. Both smile readily, both hardly shower expletives, both rarely look forlorn or dejected, neither barely wastes a breath on a futile appeal. Everything is measured, streamlined, geared towards the economy of emotion. Both are antithetical to the mean fast-bowler archetype. In a sense, these are the more dangerous types, the ones that fool you with their smile and gaiety. For, Bumrah and Shami intimidate, as the England batsmen would testify.
First hustled in Bumrah, he of slingshot bedevilment. Fear strikes fast, from eight paces. It spreads to the batsmen’s eyes faster than the ball that reaches him. Jonny Bairstow’s pupils will enlarge, his feet get cold, as he defangs the ball, gauges its wicked trajectory. Of the pair, he has the mystique and the mystery. He does a lot of things a lot of bowlers cannot, Then, he does what most of them could too. He knows the tricks in the book, and outside it too.

But this has always been a touch unfair on Shami, he of those divine wrs, and equipped with an enviable array of tricks and tactics himself. Bumrah is a non-rhythm bowler; Shami is a rhythm bowler in every sense of the phrase. The back-spinning release confounds batsmen; the bold upright seam stupefies them.
Watching them bowl in tandem is one of the pleasures of the game. The six overs they bowled together in the Powerplay, overs five to 10, produced an excellent summary of their variegated skills. Bumrah, the experimental, the innovator, handed Dawid Malan an elaborate working over that one gets to watch mostly in Tests. He would torment him with those that slanted across him, from over the wicket. The left-handed Malan had several uncertain prods and pokes.

Malan is now waiting for the one that holds the line, the final snare of entrapment. It arrived, but not in the way he had envisioned. After conceding a false assumption of safety, when Malan steered him behind square, he angled the ball after away, but a trifle shorter and with an ounce more bounce. Malan, buoyed after the four, tried to cut the ball but ended up chopping it onto the stumps. It was more of a cerebral than spectacular dismissal.
Bettering the best
The next ball certainly was, as Bumrah angled the ball into Joe Root’s pads before making it straighten a trifle to blast them. This is perhaps even tougher a ball than his standard nip-backer, for the batsmen is hooked to the angle, his eyes go legside and suddenly it straightens ever so slightly. It’s a trick the great Wasim Akram used to conjure in his prime with a wildly reverse-swinging ball.
The stage was now perfectly set up for Shami, who comes as first change after the arrival of Mohammed Siraj. It does not matter. He immediately began to pound the perfect length. Whereas in the past Shami took time to settle in, these days, he comes fully grooved, like a robot, but with divine wrs. He hits his most destructive length straightaway, the lines are seldom wayward. Forget boundaries, even singles seemed impossible, as he probed the channel, hitting the hard length, often getting extra bounce and movement either way. England batsmen played him fearfully, like intrepid ghosts upon sighting the cross being hurled at them.Most Read
1
Leo box office collection Day 9: Vijay-starrer in freefall, fails to reger uptick on second Friday as it chases Rajinikanth’s Jailer

2
Deepika Padukone kept the promise she made to mehendi art Veena Nagda in 2013: ‘She stuck to her words…’

See More

A string of nine dot balls — 15 if one counts Bumrah’s maiden between Shami’s overs — brought him a wicket that seemed an inevitability. He reduced England’s greatest miracle man, Ben Stokes, to a novice. Twice he beat him in the space of four balls with ones that seamed away after angling in, before he hammered his stumps with one that came in. The hideous and futile swipe of Stokes captured his struggles.

Like Bumrah, he was on a hat-trick too. The first ball of his next over, a nip-backer, brushed the inside edge of Jonny Bairstow’s bat onto his stumps. Together thus they eliminated all the threats —England’s lone century-maker of the tournament, their most destructive batsman, their miracle man and their best batsman of this generation. England batsmen would know — it’s what their Test colleagues, Anderson and Broad have been inflicting on visiting batsmen.
Not just this match, but in all the games they have bowled together, Shami and Bumrah make India’s bowling look twice as lethal. So much so that teams have to fear Bumrah and Shami, as they do Virat Kohli and Rohit Sharma. Irrespective of the target, the nature of the pitch and the conditions, they win matches.

Like all great pairs do, they enhance each other’s vast basket of combined skills. Though they are men of their own, their devastating strength has always been as a partnership. Twinning a pair of fast bowlers is not only cricket’s favourite old pastime, but also one of its most enriching experiences.