Bumrah blows Bazball away in Visakhapatnam Test with career-best figures at home

Openers Rohit Sharma and Yashasvi Jaiswal built on the lead of 143 with a flurry of boundaries as India ended with 28 runs on the board at Stumps.

Jasprit Bumrah celebrates his fifth wicket—of that of England’s Tom Hartley—during the second day of the second Test match against England at the Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium. | Photo Credit: K.R Deepak / The Hindu

With India putting on 396 runs in the first innings, on most days you’d expect the home team’s spinners to run the opposition ragged on the second day of a Test on a slow and low pitch. However, it was the enigmatic Jasprit Bumrah (six for 45), who picked his career-best figures at home, that bamboozled England in the second Test at the Dr. Y.S. Rajasekhara Reddy ACA-VDCA Cricket Stadium in Visakhapatnam on Saturday. 

In the dying moments of the day, with natural light fading and the floodlights coming on, the crowd at Visakhapatnam reverberated with chants of ‘Bumrah, Bumrah’ after Ben Stokes was left shell-shocked, his stumps shattered, bat on the ground, and arms in the air, trying to fathom a delivery that had just breached his defence after keeping low. 

That was the enduring image of England’s first innings, which ended on 253, leaving India 143 runs in the green.

Openers Rohit Sharma and Yashasvi Jaiswal built on the lead with a flurry of boundaries as India ended with 28 runs on the board at Stumps. 

Every Bumrah spell should come with the disclaimer, ‘Blink, and you’ll miss it’. It will save the viewer from an overwhelming sense of ‘FoMo’ (Fear of Missing out), and the batter from a deep sense of frustration and embarrassment, as Joe Root and Ollie Pope would find out. 

AS IT HAPPENED

Root, keen on resisting the urge of going too far across to the nip-backer and being trapped in front of the stumps, was caught off-guard when Bumrah got one to straighten a touch from a good length after homing in consistently in the channel. The former England skipper poked at it, Shubman Gill pouched it in the slips, and Bumrah had his man for the eighth time in Tests. In his following over, Bumrah generously displayed his wares: the slower delivery, the good-length ball and an innocuous shortish one going down leg-side that Pope flicked to fine-leg for a couple. 

The next ball, Pope had his middle and leg stumps uprooted by Bumrah’s nuclear-tipped yorker, loaded with reverse-swing, that Jonny Bairstow would have watched with wide-eyed horror from the other end, reminiscing about his similar demise in the Oval Test in 2021 with a sense of impending doom. 

Soon after tea, Bumrah preyed on Bairstow’s fear of being undone by the in-swinging delivery. In the midst of adjusting to Bumrah swinging the ball both ways, Bairstow ended up reaching out to a wide delivery outside off-stump, and Gill took the edge in the slips.

At the other end, Kuldeep Yadav, playing his first Test since December 2022, staked his claim for a more permanent spot in the team.

With openers Zak Crawley and Ben Duckett building an ominous stand after hitting Mukesh Kumar and Bumrah out of the attack post lunch, Kuldeep deceived the latter in flight with the second ball of his second spell. He beat Pope’s premature forward defence next ball, but K.S. Bharat couldn’t catch him stranded outside his crease, missing a straightforward stumping opportunity. 

Crawley, meanwhile, was cruising along, using his long stride to smother the spin rather than employing the sweeps and reverse-sweeps. He reached his fifty off 52 balls with a slog-sweep off Kuldeep and took a toll on Ravichandran Ashwin with two fours in one over, pushing off the front-foot to beat mid-off and punching off the backfoot through cover-point. 

Ashwin, who lacked consistency and fluffed his lines, was taken for 40 runs in eight overs in his first spell. Axar Patel finally stopped the Crawley juggernaut in its tracks. After being carted to the midwicket boundary, Axar floated the next delivery wide outside off to tempt Crawley, who advanced and sliced the ball high in the air as Shreyas Iyer pulled off an athletic grab running behind from backward point. 

From there on, it was Bumrah’s masterclass and Kuldeep’s oft-unstated guile, which also accounted for Ben Foakes and Rehan Ahmed, that prevented England from staging a significant comeback through its lower-order. 

Earlier, the stage was set for Yashasvi Jaiswal’s maiden double-hundred and debutant Shoaib Bashir indulged the left-hander with a full toss that was swept to the square-leg boundary. With that, India got its first double-centurion in more than four years, even as Jaiswal became the third youngest Indian to attain the landmark. 

Yashasvi Jaiswal celebrates after scoring his maiden 200. | Photo Credit: K.R Deepak / The Hindu

It eventually took England’s oldest workhorse, James Anderson, who tested Jaiswal’s outside edge repeatedly with the second new ball, to get rid of him. 

Jaiswal had shown exemplary restraint against Anderson on Friday, and continued in a similar vein, leaving the deliveries angling across him while also being troubled by the odd one that nipped back in. However, in a rush of blood to the head, Jaiswal stepped to one that was leaving him and sliced high in the air and straight to backward point. 

Anderson was miffed in the morning by Ashwin, who was standing too close to the stumps at the non-striker’s end for his liking, and responded by trapping him in front before getting the prized scalp of Jaiswal. 

With the 41-year-old defying the odds and trumping the spinners in being England’s standout bowler in tough conditions, it was Bumrah’s turn to flip the script.