For Jasprit Bumrah, wickets in England are the most difficult to bowl on, when it comes to white ball cricket. He dispelled the popular notion that the cloudy conditions give bowlers a lot of help in English conditions and said, for him England has been the toughest turf to strategise his bowling on.
“In white ball cricket, England is the flattest and the most difficult wicket to bowl on for any bowler. Usually, there is no help. It may seem as if in the cloud conditions the ball will swing but the ball doesn’t swing nor does it seam. So, in these conditions, we have to rely on our accuracy and clarity. Knowing there our flat wickets, we accordingly adjust. We prepare for the worst situation and then if there is help we focus on that,” he told journalists after training at the stadium here on Thursday.
However, he said, overall till now that wickets in the World Cup have been decent. “In the first game that we played here, there was some help with the new ball but still it was a decent wicket. As the ball got older, it got better to bat on. The oval was a flat wicket with 350 runs etc. There is some help at times, but you don’t focus on all those things. You see on a given day what works for you, analyse the wicket quickly, if there is no help you go back to your strengths. If there is help, you try to swing the ball and try to take wickets. But most of the time it is always easier to analyse the wicket and decide on the day how the wicket behaves,” he said while talking about 400 plus scores not happening.
Talking about the entry of Mohammed Shami into the opening overs due to Bhuvneshwar Kumar’s hamstring injury, Bumrah said it made no difference for him. “We are just focussing on our strengths and discussing the same with Shami. The three of us have played before and I am just focussing on what we have to do and not on does it affect us or not,” he said.
Though, he said, the injury of Shikhar Dhawan was unfortunate, he was all praise for KL Rahul’s adaptability and how the team benefits from such strengths. Him batting up the order “shows a lot about the ability of the player to adjust to the situation. He was playing at No 4 and he adapted well. In the game against Australia, he got few balls but he cleared the ball well. It says a lot about the quality of the player if he can adjust according to situation. Whenever he wants to accelerate he can so that gives us a lot of flexibility and no headaches when we are facing an injury. That’s a positive sign for us,” he added.
According to his skipper Virat Kohli, Bumrah bowls as seriously at nets as he does in the matches and in doing so he had hit Vijay Shankar in the nets yesterday. Talking about it, the bowler not many batsmen have been able to fathom, said: “We don’t obviously want to injure the batsmen but…. nobody tells the batsmen not to hit so they hit as well. It was unfortunate that he got hit but he is fine. You have to do all your preparation (in the nets). You have to practice all your deliveries so best preparation for me is to bowl to batsmen,” he said.
And does he plan his strategies to a batsman? “Sometimes you can do that, sometimes you want to try something but before that you try it in the nets because it is easier. You want to execute everything in the nets in the match, it is just about repetition so I try to do all of that be it anything be it death bowling,” he added.
Talking about his late burst against Pakistan he said, it was a stop and start game against the arch rivals. “We had a good start against South Africa against Australia. As a bowling unit we did well against Pakistan too despite the conditions. The ball was getting wet… It is difficult sometimes for the bowlers to adjust in getting in and out of the field but it was a good match for us. We didn’t take a lot of wickets early up, we kept the runrate under check so when the spinners came in the middle overs, they had to take some chances. They had a good partnership but once Kuldeep took a wicket a lot of wickets came after that because the runrate kept going up. After that when we came, we came to know that in five overs Pakistan had to make some 135 runs so we were just focussing on getting through the overs and just get along with the game,” he said.
