Kolkata: A trailer of life without Jasprit Bumrah in England was playing on loop at Leeds on Tuesday. And it wasn’t pretty. Watching Mohammed Siraj throw a fit when the England openers tried to slow down the game to avoid playing another Bumrah over before lunch wasn’t prime time television but he can’t be faulted for not trying. For the entire morning session Prasidh Krishna struggled to hit the right length. When he did, he couldn’t repeat it three balls in a row. And the second ball Shardul Thakur bowled on the day helped Ben Duckett tickle off his leg probably the easiest boundary of his life.
This was no consolidated bowling effort led by an extraordinary fast bowler, but a disjointed attempt at stopping England. Bumrah experienced a rare day when his talent finally met the kind of grit and pluck that could outsmart it. But the rest? In a match where England averaged 4.35 runs per over, Prasidh Krishna and Shardul Thakur averaged 6.28 and 5.56 respectively. The tactic too was questionable at times. India’s bowling was too reliant on Bumrah and Siraj in the first session, and then as if to prove a point it wasn’t, Siraj wasn’t bowled from the 42nd over till the new ball was taken.
Faced with a barrage of reverse and switch hits from Duckett and then Ben Stokes, Ravindra Jadeja didn’t change his pace or length. When he finally started using the rough to get the ball to grip and turn, England were less than 50 runs away from victory. These are gaps India must fill with priority, assuming that Bumrah may be rested for the second Test starting at Edgbaston on July 2.
India head coach Gautam Gambhir urged patience. “This bowling attack has one bowler with five Tests under his belt (Nitish Reddy), one has four (Prasidh), one has two (Harshit Rana) and one hasn’t debuted (Arshdeep Singh),” he said at the press conference after India’s defeat.
“We will have to give them time,” Gambhir said. “Earlier, we used to have four fast bowlers in the squad with an experience of over 40 Tests. It doesn’t make such a big impact in one-day or T20 matches, but when you go to Australia, England, or South Africa for Tests, experience matters.
“These are early days. If we start judging our bowlers after every Test, how will we develop a bowling attack? Outside Bumrah and Siraj, we don’t have that much experience, but they have quality, which is why they are in this dressing room. We have got to keep backing them because it’s not about one tour. It’s about building a fast-bowler battery that can serve India for a long time in Tests.”
Experience is one thing, but to understand which length works best should at least come naturally at this level. Prasidh lacked that for most of the match. Not until deep into the second session did he recalibrate it, and was swiftly rewarded with two wickets. But he was consistently inconsistent, evident even in the over where he dismissed Zak Crawley when he conceded two boundaries. “I think Prasidh bowled really well,” Gambhir said. “He got us crucial wickets as well. We picked him because we thought he’s got something different. “He’s got that bounce, and in the first innings I think he used that really well, and even in the second innings. He’ll keep getting better with experience. He’s got all the ingredients of being a very good bowler.”
And it’s not just how India’s bowlers bowled seemed to be worrying, but also how they batted. Aside from scoring 1 and 4, Shardul Thakur bowled 16 overs across two innings, his two strikes coming off deliveries that didn’t seem wicket-taking ones. When the onus should have been on preserving one end to let Jadeja take India’s lead past 400, Thakur flashed at a wide delivery from Josh Tongue that could have been left alone. But Gambhir refused to be hard on anyone.
“First of all, I’ll tell you it’s not that they were not applying themselves,” he said. “Sometimes people fail, and that’s okay. I know it is disappointing and more importantly, they are more disappointed than anyone. Because they knew that we had the opportunity. I’m not going to sit here and single out ‘it’s because of the tail’ or ‘the tail couldn’t contribute’ or ‘8, 9, 10, 11 couldn’t contribute’. We lose together, we win together.”
The extent to which India are willing to manage Bumrah’s workload was evident from how he wasn’t even given the second new ball. With Gambhir reiterating that there won’t be any compromise on resting Bumrah in two of the next four Tests, the rest of India’s bowlers can’t allow their overall performances to be affected from here on.
“We absolutely have the bowling attack. We believe in them. We trust in them,” said Gambhir. “When we pick the squad, we pick the squad on trust, not on hope. Those are inexperienced bowlers, but they will keep getting better, and we saw in this Test match as well that, for the first four days, we were in a position, and even on day five we were in a position, where we would have won the Test match. So, we believe and we trust that we can. These boys will deliver for us.”