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Jasprit Bumrah has delivered 5157 balls in T20s for India and Mumbai Indians; 170 of them have gone for six. It is easier to catch a fly blindfolded than smash him.
When Sam Konstas hit a couple, he became a celeb overnight. It doesn’t matter what the ball’s colour or the length of the game is; it is extraordinarily hard to hit him over the rope.
In the shortest format, he doesn’t even concede 0.2 sixes per over. That further drops down to 0.15 in an Indian shirt. Despite bowling almost 30 overs when India won the last T20 World Cup, he only went for two sixes.
Six-hitting might be the last thing you associate with Babar Azam, even at his absolute best. He only hits 0.13 sixes per over for Pakistan. It’s just slightly better than that in all top-level T20s.
In simpler terms, he hits a six once every 45 deliveries. Over his entire career, he’s actually pretty solid at hitting fours. But routinely clearing the rope isn’t really his cup of tea.
And even though we are seeing this new Olympics-obsessed T20 version of Steve Smith, you know it’s bad when he’s scoring at twice the speed and has hit nine sixes to your zero in the same match.
Babar Azam doesn’t hit sixes, and Jasprit Bumrah doesn’t allow them.
So when we saw this fake statement, we laughed. But then we stopped. Because suddenly we had to know what the likelihood was of hitting Bumrah for that many maximums. Is it even possible, and if so, who would even do it?
Babar Azam did not make that list.
There’s a 17% chance of a six being hit in an over, and that drops down to 3% when it’s two. But we see a drastic fall after that; there’s a one in 39K chance of hitting six sixes in an over.
That is against normal bowlers. And there is nothing regular about Jasprit Bumrah, but does that make it a 1 in 100,000, or a million?
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While Bumrah is undoubtedly one of the greatest bowlers in the IPL, there are moments when batters manage to hit sixes off him in the league.
No surprises here that AB de Villiers has hit the most. If you knew JP Duminy would be this high, you probably need to go outside and touch some grass. But the most fascinating name here is Pat Cummins.
KKR needed 84 runs to win off the last three when Cummins hit four sixes in an over. So while it was an unbelievable achievement, the game was basically dead at that point. (Incredibly, Bumrah still managed to finish with figures of 2/32 in his four). JP Duminy didn’t do it in one over, and that was Bumrah before his peak. Dwayne Bravo truly pulled off something special – three of his four sixes came in the penultimate over, when CSK needed 27 runs to win. Three of de Villiers’ sixes were also in the same season as Cummins.
In T20 internationals, the craziest outlier that we’ve seen in recent times is Sahibzada Farhan. The opener who struck at 134 for his country last year, somehow managed to whack three sixes against Jasprit Bumrah. But it wasn’t just the sixes; Farhan actually made 51 runs off 34 balls versus him in the Asia Cup, also hitting six fours.
And yet, he wasn’t even the only opening batter to have taken him down recently in international cricket. As we rushed to tell you, 19-year-old Sam Konstas made his Test debut at the MCG in 2024, and his first boundary was a ramp for four off Bumrah in the 7th over. The very next ball, he hit a reverse ramp that went for six. Konstas scored at more than a run a ball (34 off 33) against peak Bumrah on Boxing Day. They are still the only international sixes the young man has.
The only other batter to score two sixes in a Test off his bowling was Jos Buttler in 2018.
You would never be able to guess who has the most sixes off him in ODIs.
David Willey. A bit like Farhan and Konstas, his overall numbers seem to hold up too: 47 runs off just 32 balls, two dismissals. That’s just ridiculous for a lower-order batter, although clearly one of the best pinch hitters of the modern game.
The fact that we have an assortment of these three batters just shows how incredibly random this is, and that’s even before you throw in someone like Cummins. From the players we’ve mentioned thus far, de Villiers and Buttler are perhaps the two who you’d most expect.
If we go back to the IPL list, we also see more conventional players like Virat Kohli, Faf du Plessis and KL Rahul do a pretty good job. For them it’s mostly an extension of their normal cricketing shots, but someone like de Villiers has multiple options available to him.
Bumrah is very good at bowling dots and not going for fours, though strike rotation is relatively the easiest option against him. However, he’s a staggering 94% less likely to concede a six than the average bowler would for the overs he bowls.
It’s evident that nobody really hits a lot of sixes off him. But which batters score really quick, and therefore have a chance?