Did you see… Harry Brook charge Jasprit Bumrah?

3 minute read

We generally prefer to highlight less obvious moments, but this one seems a perfect synopsis of why this has already been a top rate Test. It was two uncanny cricketers with their own peculiar ways of going about things taking each other on within a match where you’re never quite sure what’s coming next.

Jasprit Bumrah is the best cricketer in the world. As we said before the series, plenty of magnificent cricketers have been capable of extraordinary feats, but vanishingly few stroll onto the pitch all but guaranteeing to deliver them.

This Headingley pitch is not a fiend. Players with minimal experience of UK conditions, like Yashasvi Jaiswal and Shubman Gill, have been able to make hundreds on it. All of England’s seamers bar Ben Stokes conceded comfortably over four runs an over. Of India’s other seamers, only Mohammed Siraj went at less than a run a ball.

Jasprit Bumrah surveys all this and is entirely unfazed. He doesn’t need a pitch to provide assistance. He mumbles some words and summon his own private demons who labour away for him throughout his spells.

Bumrah had already bounced out Harry Brook on Day 2. Unfortunately, it wasn’t just his right hand that was (freakishly far) beyond the line for that particular delivery. His foot was a smidge over too, so Brook survived.

Brook had been visibly discomfited that evening. It wasn’t just the non-dismissal. You know you’ve not got it right when you find yourself simultaneously leaping and ducking, which is how he tackled Bumrah’s final ball of the day.

But Harry Brook is not like other batters. If a particular bowler is giving him serious trouble, he figures the best thing to do is to bat like they’re a military-medium part-timer. What’s extra weird about this is that Brook only really struggles against the finest bowlers in the history of cricket.

Prasidh Krishna is not one of the finest bowlers in the history of cricket, so Brook had got his eye in with a lightning cut for four and then a fully-mullered six to cow corner. You could have been forgiven for thinking he was consciously upping his run-rate against the also-rans in the expectation of deadbatting the superstar at the other end. But no…

England were 227-4, still 200-and-plenty behind, and Ollie Pope – the man who’d made 106 of those 227 runs – had just been dismissed. Bumrah had visibly troubled him. There was every reason to think he was about to do so again.

Bumrah releases the ball closer to the batter than any other bowler – but not close enough for Brook, who apparently has an appetite for facing 90mph bowling from a distance of about 19 yards. He therefore scuttled down the pitch to hit the sweetest cover drive imaginable.

We’ll emphasise again how moronic it is that people have said that Harry Brook can only get better. If Harry Brook can get better, it is not by much. It is in fact far, far, far more likely that we are already witnessing peak Harry Brook and that it is only a matter of time before the curse of damn-giving comes to whisk him away from us.

There are England fans who complained vociferously about the way Brook got out later in the day. You simply cannot take away the dismissals and leave everything else behind. It is not so much that the good stuff is firmly adhered to the airborne hook shot on 99, it is that they are all but the same thing. Tug away at that particular brick and you’ll find the bloody keystone is attached to it.

The thing about performing mad, unlikely, incredible feats is that you first have to attempt them.