Will India serve up their Jasprit Bumrah eggs in time?

3 minute read

The big news ahead of the second Test at Edgbaston is that Jasprit Bumrah is eggs and somehow this is useful. (It’s probably a blessing that Rohit Sharma’s retired.)

“We feel we can go 1-1 or keep the score at 1-0 without Jasprit,” said India’s assistant coach, Ryan ten Doeschate. “That is putting the eggs at the back [end of the series]. But we are going to need him at some stage. You have to decide when to play your strongest suit.”

Based on context and the fact that it seems to be a universally accepted term in international cricket nowadays, we are willing to accept that “the back” did indeed mean the latter stages of the Test series, rather than, say, the back of the fridge. (Our fridges and freezers selection metaphor never really caught on.)

That still doesn’t fully answer the question of how Jasprit Bumrah is eggs though. We get that when you put all your eggs in one basket, each egg is a valuable thing worth looking after, but in that scenario the basket is the safe place. The basket is where the eggs are safe, unless some disaster were to occur that would result in the bursting, dropping or incineration of the basket and damage to all of its cargo.

So does ten Doeschate mean active deployment of the Bumrah eggs when he says “putting the eggs at the back”? Is the assumption that until the Bumrah eggs are deployed, they will remain as safe as it’s possible to be when eggs are stored in a basket?

(Quick digression here. We were recently given a bucket of eggs – a literal bucket of eggs – from a farm. They were all loose; just piled in there with no real regard for whether they’d survive the journey. We were actually low grade staggered at how few ended up damaged. We reckon it was one or maybe two that suffered mild crushing out of probably 30- or 40-odd eggs. Even with those, the shell still held sufficiently that there was no real leakage.)

Another question is if the Bumrah eggs are being stowed until they’ll have most impact, what is happening with them when they are eventually used? “You have to decide when to play your strongest suit,” makes it sound like India have a weird deck of cards and we’re actually in card game territory here. We found this one deck from Nebraska where the suits are eggs, milk, pork chops and burgers. Maybe they have one of those?

If we discount that possibility then we’re left with two options. Either it’s a culinary metaphor or the eggs are serving as weapons. We can make a pretty strong case that it’s the latter; that they’re yolky projectiles.

Never mind cherries and peaches and jaffas. There is just as much logic in referring to an unplayable ball as an egg. Eggs aren’t round, so if you hard boil one, it’ll bounce unpredictably. This is therefore an entirely fitting label for a Jasprit Bumrah delivery.

“Oh that’s an absolute egg there from Bumrah.”

It also raises the prospect of an England batter ending up with egg on his face, or of an egg resulting in a duck – both of which make complete sense.

So will India survey this series and Bumrah’s inability to play in every Test and ‘put their eggs at the back’? Or might a series victory already be moving out of reach by then?

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