No magic, just method does it for brilliant Bumrah

PTI

Visakhapatnam, February 3

For someone who produced one magical delivery after another to record his best figures in India, Jasprit Bumrah feels there is no need to search for magic when the ball is reversing.

The 30-year-old was an artist at work on Day 2 of the second Test against England as he got the ball to reverse in three destructive spells across the last two sessions to end up with figures of six for 45 in 15.5 overs.

The wily operator got the rewards for reverse swing in the series opener too, but he operated at an even higher level today.

The way he set up the likes of Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow and Ollie Pope by getting the ball to move both ways before trapping them was a treat to watch. It wasn’t a surprise that the video clip of the booming in-swinging yorker to castle Pope was circulated widely on social media.

On his thought process before bamboozling Pope, Bumrah said: “At that time, the ball was relatively hard. So yes, there was some reverse swing. In reverse swing, you don’t have to bowl magical deliveries every ball. I had bowled a few away-going deliveries and then there was a thought going on in my head that what do I bowl? I should bowl a length delivery coming in or should I go for a yorker? But I had not bowled a yorker till then. I thought okay might as well take a chance with that and it did swing a lot. The execution was good.” — PTI

We can chase anything, says Crawley

England opener Zak Crawley today said their ultra-attacking approach allows them to chase “anything” in the fourth innings after the visitors conceded a 143-run lead. Crawley’s confidence has more reasons to it than hollow bravado. The tourists were 190 runs in deficit even in the series opener at Hyderabad before pulling off a comeback win for the ages. Back in 2022, England comfortably chased a stiff target of 378 in the rescheduled fifth Test against India in Birmingham to draw the home series.

“We won’t get too far ahead of ourselves, focus on tomorrow morning first, focus on ourselves. That is what we did really well last week. If you look at the game as a whole, we looked at one session at a time, even less than that at times. We will do that again and I think that gives us the best chance. We believe we can chase anything and we’ve shown that before,” said Crawley.

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