159 dismissals in 36 Tests, 149 dismissals in 89 ODIs, and 89 dismissals in 70 T20s are very good by any standards.
And yet they don't speak to Jasprit Bumrah's true value and his special appeal, notes Sreehari Nair.
'Numbers don't lie,' that wearied truism, had to be Jasprit Bumrah's to dismantle.
To think, he belongs to India, a country that is soaked in that most pernicious of habits: Of using numbers as the barometer of quality.
To think, he dismantles the truism in an age when exit poll figures and box-office receipts and social media share counts have all proved much too unreliable in conveying to us what the real picture is.
In such a country, in such an age, how heartening it is to discover that Jasprit Bumrah's wicket tally does not quite justify why he's our greatest bowler, and perhaps even our greatest match-winner.
159 dismissals in 36 Tests, 149 dismissals in 89 ODIs, and 89 dismissals in 70 T20s are very good by any standards.
And yet they don't speak to Bumrah's true value and his special appeal, both of which may be closer to that of football's greatest midfielders.
Yes, his is an 'unquantifiable' sort of brilliance; for to understand how supremely he beams down upon the cricket field, you have to take stock of what the mood in an opposition camp was before a super-important Bumrah over and how the mood turned after his six balls were sent down.
To Bumrah, bowling with accuracy and guile in a tight situation is not something to be worked out but almost second nature, something as natural as breathing.
In such situations, he operates as though he has the match script handed to him in advance.
We don't have statistical models witty enough to quantify how he destroys the momentums of those freight trains marching toward set destinations.
The Bumrahiac logic seems to be: Pulverise oppositions by waving them into blind alleys and cul-de-sacs.
When he is done playing his designated role, you'll find that he has passed on a part of his charisma to his team-mates as well.
The opposition, then, has no option but to believe that cricketers who share the dressing room with Bumrah must also possess something of his genius.
How on earth do you quantify such a transposition?
So here's the eventuality I am prepping you for.
We, those of us who have watched this most mythical of bowlers in action, intuitively understand that his value and his appeal cannot be explained mathematically.
Yet, when a future blowhard may bring up the subject of how Bumrah does not have the scalps to back up his tag of an 'all-time great,' we can only pray that we have the vocabulary to dispute the proposition.
I don't know if Jasprit Bumrah will ever get close to even Kapil Dev's tally of 434 Test wickets (I specifically say 434 because it has the same symbolic significance to a 90s kid as the MiG-21 did to an earlier generation).
But Bumrah's true worth lies in the fact that he makes you weigh what's at stake during critical match moments, when the difference between a job done well and a job done ill is wafer-thin, and then he goes ahead and stamps his authority over such moments.
He makes you watch the game closely, gets you away from that lazy habit of waiting for the match summary to draw out a cute conclusion.
Among other things, he makes connoisseurs out of casual onlookers.
Lesser bowlers, ones who aren’t existential artists, can settle for goosing up their wicket columns; Jasprit Bumrah's impact lies outside the realm of numbers.
Feature Presentation: Aslam Hunani/Rediff.com
