Rohit Mahajan

Jasprit Bumrah’s entrapment of Joe Root on the final day of the second Test at Lord’s was timely and breathtaking. The English captain, under pressure with four wickets gone for 67 in a chase of 272, was drawn into a false stroke by a ball bowled with the highest skill: Bumrah went wide at the crease, angling the ball towards the off-stump, forcing Root to play it — but the ball straightened after pitching and took the bat’s edge and Kohli at slip caught it safely.

Just how good is this Indian pace bowling attack? The four pacemen took all 19 wickets to fall to bowlers at Lord’s; in the previous Test at Nottingham, the four pacemen had taken all 20 English wickets before the final day washout robbed us of a great finale.

India fast bowlers have taken 19 or more wickets in a Test match on five occasions — all since January 2018, when they took 20 at Johannesburg. That was the first time all 20 opponent wickets in a Test were taken by India’s pacers. This was followed by 19 wickets at Nottingham in 2018, 19 against Bangladesh at Kolkata (the Day/Night Test) in 2019, and 20 and 19 wickets in the two Tests in the current series against England.

Pace boom

India is going through a pace boom, and the options at Virat Kohli’s disposal would be the envy of past captains such as Bishan Singh Bedi, Sunil Gavaskar, Mohammed Azharuddin or Sachin Tendulkar.

India’s pacemen have opened up the horizons for the batsmen — failure no longer carries certainty of doom.

In 2011 in England, Rahul Dravid scored three hundreds in four Tests — yet India lost the series 4-0! This happened because England scored at least 470 in one innings of each Test — 474/8 and 544 were their best scores in the four innings of the first two Tests, and 710/7 and 591/6 were their scores in the only innings they batted in the last two Tests. The Indian bowling was just not up to the mark.

India’s batting fared badly, too. Dravid averaged 76.83, but the rest of the legend line-up flopped — Sachin Tendulkar averaged 34.12, Yuvraj Singh 35, MS Dhoni 31.42, VVS Laxman 22.75, Gautam Gambhir 17 and Virender Sehwag 10.25.

Yet, India still might have made a fight of it if the pace bowling were any good — but India’s best, Zaheer Khan, was injured on the very first day of the first Test after bowling only 13.3 overs, in which he had picked up two wickets. Praveen Kumar, pitchforked into the frontline, did better than expected, with 15 wickets at 29.53; Ishant Sharma, in his fourth year as an India player, was a disappointment, his 11 wickets costing him 58.18 runs each. S Sreesanth was worse and RP Singh — recalled to the Test team while holidaying in Miami! — was clearly unfit for Test cricket, paunchy and ineffective.

The pace situation of the team was so abject that after Zaheer went off injured on Day 1 of the series at Lord’s, skipper Dhoni took his wicketkeeper’s pads and gloves off and bowled eight overs of medium pace!

Ten years on, Kohli marshals India’s best-ever pace attack. The pacemen keep India in the hunt even when the batting fails.