For the iconic athletes, the biggest challenge is not delivering jaw-dropping performances, but making people believe that they are still human, prone to failures and self-doubt.
We have seen that with Roger Federer in 2008, when the Swiss maestro, recovering from glandular fever, looked a pale shadow of the player who had mesmerised the world with his tennis artistry.
Federer, already a 12-time Grand Slam winner, eventually bounced back from the significant dip in form and fitness, slaying the demons in his mind before ushering in the golden era of tennis alongside Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.
Now, in terms of aesthetics, Jasprit Bumrah is as far removed from Roger Federer as the graceful one-handed backhand is from the scorching yorker of a fast bowler.
Notwithstanding his unorthodox action and the short run-up, Bumrah’s beauty lies in his precision and the rare ability to lift an entire team on his back, especially when the chips are down.
His pace, awkward angle and the relentless accuracy have bamboozled the world’s best batters for almost a decade now.
And when you add all those qualities to his incredible consistency and match-winning heroics, it’s not difficult to see why almost every former cricketer compares Bumrah to the greatest fast bowlers of all time, including Malcolm Marshall.
No other fast bowler in the history of the game has taken more than 200 Test wickets while maintaining a sub-20 average.
The right-armer has been equally ruthless in both formats of limited-overs cricket, where the batting-friendly rules have rarely stopped him from troubling the batters.
The piece de resistance was his death-overs heroics in the final of the 2024 T20 World Cup against South Africa when he single-handedly snatched victory from the jaws of defeat.
But the same bowler, unstoppable across formats, now seems to have hit a roadblock.
For the first time in his career, the 32-year-old is grappling with a serious loss of form and rhythm. A bowler who put fear in every batsman’s mind is now being hit for sixes for fun.
In Mumbai Indians’ 10 matches of the Indian Premier League (IPL) so far that Bumrah has featured in, he has taken just three wickets at 109.67.
Mumbai, the five-time champions who are struggling in the race for a playoff berth, earned a much-needed win against Lucknow Super Giants on Monday.
But Bumrah’s woes continued as he gave away 45 runs from his four overs, looking completely out of form and even giving away three no-balls.
Bumrah has always found a way to deliver for his team even after returning from long injury layoffs.
But this time, despite playing a big role in India’s triumphant T20 World Cup campaign, where he was the joint-highest wicket-taker with 14 wickets, Bumrah suffered seven wicketless spells in the IPL, where batters have nonchalantly hit him for sixes.
He is no longer the bowler that the captain can turn to in a crisis.
So can India’s greatest fast bowler bounce back from the biggest crisis of his career?
No one would write off a man who had seen the vagaries of life from a very young age.
Raised by a single mother after the early death of his father, Bumrah’s path to the top was laden with obstacles.
But he never gave up on his dreams. Despite the hardships in life and an unconventional bowling style, he kept pushing the boundaries until the world began to admire his rare talent.
It’s unlikely now that a man with such resilience will allow a blip in form to derail his pursuit of more silverware.
This is where he may need to draw inspiration from Federer. The tennis icon delivered a masterclass in workload management when he took a five-month break after a knee injury in 2016 before making a stunning comeback at the 2017 Australian Open, where he beat old rival Nadal in an epic five-set final.
Perhaps, Bumrah’s body is crying for a rest. The punishing schedule in cricket can break the fittest of the players, both mentally and physically. With Bumrah’s history of back injuries, managing his schedule could be key to his return to peak form.
But given the demands of franchise cricket, where team owners spend big on star players, it’s not going to be a straightforward solution for India’s bowling trump card.
As he approaches the mid-30s, the onus is on Bumrah to prolong his career.
From now on, sacrificing a few matches of the IPL every season on bowlers’ graveyards could inject new life into Bumrah.
This was the pick-and-choose template Federer adopted in his late-30s, which allowed him to produce some of the most unforgettable performances in the Grand Slams.
Will Bumrah take a leaf out of Federer’s book?
It’s impossible to peer into the mind of a champion.
But if he does follow in Federer’s footsteps — even at the expense of the IPL — it’s cricket which will be richer as the sport has rarely seen a bowler as breathtakingly brilliant as the Indian pace spearhead.
Source: Khaleej Times