Jasprit Jasbirsingh Bumrah, an Indian international cricketer Mexy Xavier; Wardrobe: Shacket-Countrymade; Styling: Nayaab Randhawa; Styling Assistant: Sezmin; Hair: Team Hakim’s Aalim (Akash); Makeup: Team Juhika Bumrah (Mehek Singh)
Jasprit Bumrah loves playing cricket. So much so, that when asked what he would have been if not a cricketer, he says: “I have no clue. I would have been a struggling cricketer.”
Within cricket, too, he has another favourite: Bowling. Seated in a vanity van in Mumbai’s Mehboob Studios, Bumrah’s face lights up when you ask him about it. “My teammates know that batting doesn’t excite me. I’m always letting them know bowling is tougher than batting,” he says. Perhaps no surprises that his pick for the toughest batter he’s ever bowled to is a player who, although has six Test centuries, is known more for his wily bowling and over 500 Test wickets. “[It’s] R Ashwin in the nets,” says Bumrah with a grin, “he brings things out of the box.”
Bumrah’s love affair with bowling is a longstanding one that started in his growing-up years when, like every other Indian kid, he was addicted to watching cricket on television (TV). But unlike most taken by the fireworks with the bat, the fast bowlers caught his eye. “It was a sight seeing the stumps flying, the batters ducking and jumping. It fascinated me,” he says.
Life has come full circle for Bumrah, for it is now him who makes the batters dance.
Few players in modern cricket have started conversations like Bumrah. He trots in and releases like a trebuchet, albeit a touch awkward to the eye, teasing and taunting the batters with impeccable line and length before slaying them. He routinely clocks speeds of nearly 140 km/hour, and has a breadth of repertoire that covers seam, swing, reverse, slowers, yorkers, what have you.
At a time format specialists are on the rise, Bumrah has been able to stamp his authority across formats. 2024 is a case in point: In the year, he won the Player of the Series in India’s victorious T20 World Cup campaign, became the year’s highest wicket-taker with 77 wickets in 20 matches, and was also the most prolific Test bowler with 62 wickets in 12 Tests (as of December 18, till the end of the third Test against Australia).
He has been lethal irrespective of conditions—while his overall career average (the number of runs conceded per wicket) is at a measly 20.54, in spin-friendly home conditions it creeps up only just, to 22.76. His Test average, at 19.52, is second only to Englishman Sydney Barnes (among bowlers who have taken at least 150 wickets). But Bumrah, with 194 wickets, has overtaken Barnes in the tally of wickets, which means no other bowler in the history of the game has taken as many wickets at a better average.
Bumrah’s five-wicket haul in the first innings of the third Test match against Australia took him past Zaheer Khan and Ishant Sharma as the Indian pacer with the second-highest fifers, next only to Kapil Dev. With that spell, though, he overtook Dev to record the highest fifers in SENA (South Africa, England, New Zealand, Australia) countries among Indians. His three-for in the second innings of the same match—adding up to 53 in Australia in 10 matches—has made him the highest Indian wicket-taker Down Under, also surpassing Dev.
“I don’t know how to react to these numbers because I never focussed on numbers,” says the bowler. “I look at what I wanted to do as a child—to bowl like those I see on TV, and play for India. Now that I’m doing that, I go back to that child who would be happy with the numbers, but happier that he is helping the team win.”
While he might be right up there in every slice-and-dice of data, the Bumrah phenomenon can’t merely be captured by numbers. His ability to stymie the run flow, even in a format as slam-bang as T20, has changed the course of matches. The final of the T20 World Cup is a recent example. Bumrah came in to bowl the 18th over, with South Africa needing 22 runs off 18 balls—an easy task with big-hitters David Miller and Marco Jansen at the crease. By the time he was done, giving away two runs and scalping a wicket, Bumrah’s chokehold had left South Africa gasping.
“I would be lying if I said I was not worried. I was talking to myself, telling myself to stay positive,” says Bumrah about the phase when South Africa needed 30 runs off as many balls. “Then, when I came for my second-last over [16th over of the match], I saw the ball reversing—that doesn’t happen a lot. I thought if I can squeeze in a good over here, the run rate will go higher and pressure will mount.”
“Also,” he adds, “I was staying in the present. I was not looking at a last-ball victory, but looking at one by one, slowly taking the team to a better position. If I had thought of bowling a glory ball, or doing something magical, it would have never worked.”
The celebratory return home from the West Indies after the win was a stark contrast to the night of November 19 (2023), when India lost the final of the ODI World Cup to Australia played in his hometown of Ahmedabad. “I came back home that night and it was all silent, but in June [after the T20 World Cup victory] it was all so different. Nothing was there when we had fallen short,” says Bumrah. “So, while we were very happy with the World Cup win, we didn’t go overboard; our feet were firmly grounded.”
In February, during the second Test match against England in Visakhapatnam, Bumrah sent the cricket community into raptures with a toe-crushing, laser-guided yorker that skittled the stumps of Ollie Pope, the centurion in the previous match. As The Guardian’s match report of the day describes it: “Middle stump jagged left, leg stump flew right, leaving off stump standing there all alone. Pope’s feet were briefly in a different postcode, his bat on the floor.”
Bumrah admits bowling the yorker, a skill he picked up unknowingly while playing gully cricket in Ahmedabad, gives him kicks. “As a kid, it looked fascinating to see batters on the ground. I would replicate that while playing tennis-ball cricket, thinking that was the only way to get wickets. So, I would keep bowling yorkers again and again, even at my house or when I would go down to play. I didn’t feel I was developing a skill, I was doing it because I was having fun,” says Bumrah. “When I came into serious cricket, I realised I had acquired the skill of bowling yorkers.”
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RISE AND RISE
Like his yorker, much of Bumrah’s bowling has been shaped by watching TV. He says that every time a bowler would do well, he would copy his action. “My heroes used to change depending on whoever was doing well. In the end, I think it all jumbled up and I made my own style,” he says laughing.
His first formal coaching started after his 10th standard, when he started to play for the school. By and by, he crossed all the subsequent levels—from school, to district, to state. In 2012, in his first year of under-19 cricket for Gujarat, he played only four games, but picked up 25 wickets. “That gave me a lot of encouragement as my name started to appear in the newspapers. It gave me confidence that if I was doing well at the national level, I must have something special,” says Bumrah. Next year, he was called up to play the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, the domestic T20 tournament, for Gujarat. “When I was playing my second game, John Wright, former Kiwi batter and then the Mumbai Indians (MI) head coach, came to watch. And that’s how, when I turned 19, I got my Indian Premier League (IPL) contract to play for MI. That was special.”
In a recent interview with former English captain Michael Atherton for The Post, the New Zealand-based daily, Wright explains how his conviction about Bumrah—“the kid running in with an unusual action and trying to bowl 12 consecutive yorkers”—was vindicated. “The first game of the IPL was at Bengaluru. We had nets and I sorted it out that Sachin [Tendulkar] would face him and at the end of the session, Sachin came to me and said: ‘John, who is that kid?’ I said, ‘That’s Boom’. He said, ‘He’s really hard to pick up’. I could have jumped for joy,” Wright tells Atherton.
Besides Wright and Tendulkar, Bumrah’s exploits also convinced a key figure in the bowler’s life: His mother. A school teacher, she brought up Bumrah and his sister single-handedly after they lost their father early. But she didn’t buy into Bumrah’s obsession with cricket and insisted on a back-up plan for a career. “She began to get the sense that I was doing well when my name appeared in the newspapers. But the first time she saw me on the TV playing the IPL, she was convinced I was good enough,” says Bumrah.
Mahela Jayawardene, MI’s head coach, recalls one of the earliest hints he’d seen of what Bumrah was shaping up to be. This was in the 2017 IPL and MI was playing against Gujarat Lions in a game that stretched into the super over, where MI had 11 runs to defend. “Lasith Malinga was our lead bowler and no one would look past him to defend the total. I had an intuition that Jasprit would be a better option, and spoke to him, and he agreed to take on the challenge,” says Jayawardene. The punt worked, as Bumrah gave away only six runs, bowling to batters like Brendon McCullum and Aaron Finch. “But beyond the result, it showed me the character of the guy—ready to face anything that he comes up against,” adds Jayawardene. “The Jasprit of today came from those moments.”
STEPPING UP
But Bumrah’s bowling isn’t just about running in and hitting the lines and lengths. Jayawardene says the speedster is masterful in his thinking of what he wants to do with the ball, and how it can generate the maximum impact. Both in the IPL and at the international level, Bumrah has been the team’s go-to bowler for wickets. And he’s lived up to the challenge. Among bowlers with 400+ wickets across formats, only Malinga has a better strike rate (the average number of balls to take wickets) than Bumrah, and among cricketers with at least 150 Test wickets, only South Africa’s Kagiso Rabada is ahead of him.
“To be successful, one has to know how to stand up when you are knocked down. [When I think of this], I specifically think of my journey of playing against Bumrah,” says de Villiers. “The first time I met him, I dominated him. He took it on the chin and quietly, within himself, sent me a message: ‘I’ll be back, you’ll see’. And the following season, when he got another opportunity to bowl at me, it was a different story.”
“This wasn’t a guy whose strategy was to give me a single and get me off the strike so that he’s able to have a go at the other batter,” de Villiers continues. “He was among the few bowlers who would step up and see if he could knock me over the next ball.”
How does Bumrah handle the pressure of doing Bumrah things every time he picks up the ball? Because, he says, he doesn’t look at it as pressure since he doesn’t really care about expectations. “The pressures and hopes of others are not my problem,” says Bumrah. “I love the sport and I will do my absolute best on the ground—if it works out, great; if it doesn’t, I’ll learn and move on.”
A case in point would be going wicketless in the World Test Championship (WTC) final in June 2021 to emerging as the top wicket-taker in the five-Test series against England that started six weeks on. “I gave my absolute best in the WTC final, but I didn’t have a great day,” he says. There are days, he adds, you’ll get a wicket with a bad ball, and there are days you will return empty-handed despite a great spell. “That’s cricket.”
Bumrah does admit that, early on, his performance would dictate his mood swings. But fatherhood has been a great leveller. Son Angad, who is all of one but has watched from the stands Bumrah script memorable victories for the team—like the T20 World Cup final or in the Test versus Australia in Perth—has taught him to look at life beyond sport. “Now, everything is about him,” he says. Once home from work, both Bumrah and his sports presenter wife Sanjana Ganesan switch off and turn their focus on Angad. “Yes, cricket is my job and I give it my absolute best, but once the game is over, I don’t think about it.”
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Turning to family helped Bumrah tide over a difficult 327-day pause in his career when a stress fracture, and subsequent surgery, took him out of the game. During this phase, he missed the T20 World Cup in 2022 as well as IPL 2023, and uncertainty hung over whether he would be able to recover in time for the ODI World Cup. “It was a difficult time given that I was confused about when I would return,” says Bumrah, “but, during that period, I was refreshed mentally as I got a break from cricket and spent a lot of time with my family. This was also the time the baby was on the way, so it was good to be around. When I returned, I felt rejuvenated.”
The proof of the pudding lies in the fact that immediately upon his return in August 2023, in a three-match T20 series against Ireland, he got a wicket with his second ball, bagged four wickets in the eight overs he bowled in the rain-curtailed tournament and ended up as the Player of the Series. In the 40 matches he has played since his return, Bumrah has bagged 113 wickets. Since his international debut in 2016, he’s been the stingiest in 2024—conceding only 13.35 runs for each wicket, while, at 3.08, his economy rate (the number of runs conceded per over) is the second-lowest in his career.
CRICKET SMARTS
What makes Bumrah such a great bowler? To start off, his action. His hyperextended arm gives Bumrah the ability to deliver the ball from a point ahead of the crease, instead of from the top of the crease, as is the case with most bowlers—which means the ball is released 30-odd cm closer to the batters. Add to that his speed and accuracy that robs batters of precious time to pick him.
Says de Villiers: “He has a very whippy wrist that gives a lot of torque on the ball, which not a lot of people pick up. He gets a lot of backspin on the ball with his wrists pushing really hard down. But while doing that he’s very upright with his head. With that very weird run-up, everything looks unorthodox, but when you slow things down at the crease, his basics are very good. That’s the reason he’s so consistent.”
But biomechanics is only half the story behind Bumrah’s success. His cricket canny is the other half. Few modern bowlers have the ability to read the game and set up batters like Bumrah—his series of outswingers followed by a ball that nips back in, the strategic slower ball surprises.
His cricketing intelligence was on display recently during the first Test against Australia in Perth, when he was asked about his “bold decision” to bat first. Bumrah said it was influenced by his memory of the Test he played at the venue in 2018, when he noticed the wicket went a little soft to start with and then became quicker. “I was relying on that experience,” explained Bumrah, who captained India to victory in the match.
People who know Bumrah say it’s not a one-off. “He is a thinker. He’s constantly thinking about how he’s going to bowl,” says Paras Mhambrey, the MI bowling coach. Mhambrey, who was India’s national bowling coach before joining MI in October, recalls times when [then head coach] Rahul Dravid and he used to deliberate on ongoing matches from the dressing room. “We would discuss among ourselves what sort of ball would be apt for the situation. And voila, Boom would bowl it. It shows how aware he is of the game while on the field,” says Mhambrey.
While Bumrah has been anointed the vice-captain for India’s recent bilaterals, and has been the stand-in captain on occasions—most recently in the first Test against Australia, when Rohit Sharma was on paternity leave—his stewardship of the bowling attack, even without a formal designation, has been evident. At team meetings, he takes the bowlers through detailed plans for the match, on the field he is seen chatting with bowlers at the top of their marks, Md Siraj has mentioned he keeps “talking to Jassi bhai” while emerging pacer Arshdeep Singh told Forbes India in an earlier interview that he always picks Bumrah’s brains.
“You can see him talking to the likes of Siraj or Akash Deep for example, discussing the field, the line they should bowl etc. He’s been the leader of India’s bowling attack for some time now. And the others respect him for that,” says Mhambrey. “I would always want him to drive team meetings because he has so much experience.”
Is leadership something he enjoys? “Leadership, for me, isn’t just about the post. My leadership philosophy is to help others,” says Bumrah. “I try to understand what helped me when I came into the team as a youngster. So, if somebody new comes in, even if I’m not the captain, I go up to them and try to make them comfortable, because that helps the team. I’ve seen great leaders leave their level and come on to yours. That’s what I try to do,” he says.
At MI, his only home in the IPL since his debut in 2013, Bumrah has been a part of the core leadership group for a while now and a sounding board for everyone. “He has always been a man of a few words, but words that have a lasting impact on those who have sought his advice. He will do his training in the nets and then spend time with the other bowlers and, given his cricket intelligence, he is able to guide them on what they should do, rather than telling them what works for him,” says Jayawardene.
BRAND BUMRAH
That Bumrah is among cricket’s biggest blockbusters at the moment is evident from his spiralling brand value. From 11 in September 2023, Bumrah now endorses 20-plus brands; during this period, his endorsement fee has gone up from ₹1.5-2 crore per day to ₹3 crore. “But what’s important is that brands have stood by him,” says Nikhil Bardia, head of Rise Worldwide, the agency that manages him. It’s reflected in the fact that his deals span three years on an average, and, just through renewals, his brand value has recorded an over-347 percent jump in the current fiscal.
“He built his brand where credibility is very high, performance is very high, consistency is very high. So, we were very clear as a management group that those were the aspects that needed to stand out in him,” says Bardia.
One of his recent endorsements—of Quess Corp, a leading staffing brand—is a testament to that. Says Guruprasad Srinivasan, the company’s ED & group CEO, “He embodies the essence of Quess Corp—resilient, dependable, and relentlessly focussed on excellence. A partnership with him positions us for the next level of growth in brand awareness and perception.”
Bardia adds that when they started off building his brand equity, their challenge was how to get Bumrah’s jersey No 93 to be what everyone wants to wear. A part of the riddle would surely have been solved now given Bumrah’s soaring social media following. According to Comscore data as of December 7, Bumrah has 34 million followers across social media. On Instagram, he is the fifth most-followed active cricketer with a following of 18.6 million—1.25 million among them were acquired during the T20 World Cup, and 305,000 since the beginning of India’s series with Australia.
“These numbers happen because everything around the content is an effort to bring him closer to his fans. He is a very private person, but he understands the love he gets from his fans, and, over the years, has evolved trying to get closer to them using social media as a platform,” says Bardia.
In 2019, Bumrah was onboarded by fantasy sports platform Dream11 as one of its earliest brand ambassadors. While it’s tough to isolate the effect of an individual endorser, says Vikrant Mudaliar, CMO, Dream Sports, Bumrah’s role consistently scores significantly above average on likeability and authenticity in the campaigns that he has appeared in. “Jasprit has an incredible sway with fans. His integrity, good nature and immaculate behaviour are assets for any brand associating with him,” says Mudaliar. “He offers us the unique opportunity of showcasing the ‘nice guys can also finish first’ theme.”
In the annual Celebrity Brand Valuation report brought out by risk and financial advisory services company Kroll in 2023, Bumrah ranked among the top 40 sports and entertainment celebrities in the country. If they were to whittle down the list to only cricketers, says Aviral Jain, the managing director, he ranks among the top five active cricketers, and is the only bowler in that bracket.
Like his bowling, Bumrah remains an outlier with his brand equity too as, in cricket, batters continue to be more visible, earn instant recall and enjoy a greater following. Says Bardia: “He was very clear from day one that it wasn’t about batter versus bowler—his objective was to be a world-class athlete. And we always looked through that lens—trying to develop his brand as an athlete.”
While Brand Bumrah is at its glorious peak now, Rise is working closely with the bowler and looking to launch his own identity and logo through which his brand legacy will continue even when Bumrah retires from the game. “We are already working on our next line of thinking that will bring him a step closer to fans,” adds Bardia.
Bumrah himself doesn’t think much about his sporting legacy. And when he does hang up his boots, he isn’t targetting numbers to define him. “The only thing I have focussed on and I want to do is, the day I finish, I want to ask myself only one question: Did I give it my absolute best? And that answer should be yes, and the tank will be empty. Then I’ll be happy.”