2 minute read
All right you primitive screwheads, listen up. We honestly aren’t all that interested in T20 cricketers who aren’t Jasprit Bumrah any more.
It’s a cliché to call bowlers cannon fodder in this format, but we’ve reached a point now where really it’s the batters who are the unchanging nondescript wallpaper. We found them beautiful once, but they got real ugly. They’re so samey, so relentless and so numerous. One after another they come, like The Army of Darkness; scores of armoured skeletons, every last one utterly bent on destruction.
Thankfully, we also have an Ash in the form of Jasprit Bumrah, a man with a good arm and an unmatched ability to dispatch these monsters in endlessly imaginative ways.
They see him standing there at the end of his mark. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” they think.
On the face of it, India’s batters shaped their 2026 T20 World Cup win, making 253 in the semi-final and 255 in the final. But for us at least, the more of them that contributed, the less interesting it became.
This feeling can happen in a T20 World Cup. Short package highlights in particular can feel a bit AI-generated: all bat swishes and shots of the sky, accompanied by commentators saying insightful things like ‘wow’. They’re broad brush pastiches shorn of distinguishing detail.
It’s numbing. Two England batters scored hundreds in this tournament; two India batters careered along at basically two runs a ball; Finn Allen did both. Some batter or other is always achieving something.
We admire it in a slightly detached way. The way previously low percentage shots have been transformed into not merely viable options but reliable ones has been revolutionary, but these are no longer unique skills. Not everyone can do these things, but an awful lot of people can – too many for it to remain entirely interesting, if we’re honest.
Bumrah, however, is still resolutely ploughing his own furrow in both stylistic and statistical returns. Just what does he think he’s doing? Everything he tries seems to work. On Sunday, he bowled Jimmy Neesham and Matt Henry with back-to-back full tosses.
In this tournament, Bumrah took 14 wickets in eight games and conceded barely a run a ball.
In a semi-final in which only one other bowler went at under 10 an over (Hardik Pandya, who went at 9.50), Bumrah condeded 8.25, and while his ludicrous return of 4-15 off four overs in the final largely only cemented a result that was already odds-on, the mere notion that there were Bumrah overs still to come had already twisted much of New Zealand’s earlier batting.
Even when he’s not doing anything, he’s the most interesting thing about a T20 game.
Hail to the king, baby.
