Late release, rushed batters
Clearly, Jasprit Bumrah doesn't fit the prototype of the hulking fast bowler. Naturally skinny, and standing around 5"10', he is surprisingly neither strong nor naturally athletic. "He's not the best athlete I've worked with," former India fielding coach R Sridhar sheepishly admitted. Long-time India trainer Soham Desai agreed. "If you see him run, he's not very athletic. He has not played any other sport: his coordination and ball sense when it comes to other sports, like football, is not at a very high level."
That's not to say that Bumrah has no physical advantages. "Jasprit has a very elastic body," Manprit Juneja, a friend and Gujarat team-mate of the bowler, explains. "Even after knee surgery, the range of motion in his knee was better than normal people. It was always like that; he could touch his palms on the ground. He was born like that."
"In the India team, there are three or four guys who are hypermobile," Desai says. "But the degree of hypermobility varies. Bumrah is at a very high level of hypermobility. He basically works like an elastic band when he's at his prime."
That hypermobility is most obvious in Bumrah's elbow joint, which can straighten well beyond 180degrees.
Such unusual flexibility has a drastic impact. Firstly, the hyperextended elbow means that Bumrah's arm recoils like a whipcord - allowing him to generate much more pace from the arm than the average bowler. As human movement expert Dr Paul Felton explains, "Twenty degrees [of hyperextension] gives you about a 5% increase in ball speed over somebody who doesn't hyperextend. If you think about Bumrah, it looks like it's going to be about 80mph, and then you get this increase. And I'd say he's closer to 40 degrees, so it could be a 10% increase." Clearly, Bumrah's hypermobility gives him a serious pace boost.
Equally, it drastically alters the angle of the arm - allowing Bumrah to release the ball later, from well in front of his body. This is more significant than you might expect. Notice the difference between his and MItchell Starc's release points.
Where most bowlers release the ball from more or less in line with the crease, Bumrah delivers from up to 50cm in front - his arm pointed towards 11:00 rather than 12:00. This means that the ball has less distance to travel - as a result, it comes onto the batter quicker than they expect. This makes a real difference: ball-tracking data suggests that Bumrah's late release gives his deliveries a "real feel" up to 6kph faster than the figure recorded on the speed gun.
So when Bumrah is clocked at 140kph, it feels like he's bowling 146kph. During India's tour of Australia in 2018, the speed gun consistently registered speeds north of 150kph for him: these balls would have felt as though they were being sent down in the high 150s - in line with the fastest deliveries ever recorded. Due to this differential, pace is one of the more underappreciated aspects of Bumrah's arsenal. There is a disconnect between what we see on TV and what batters experience in the middle. Those who've faced Bumrah often reflect on feeling "rushed"; on the whole, he's quicker than batters expect.
Let's look back at Bumrah's IPL debut. Here he was - a complete unknown stumbling towards the wicket, disparagingly billed by broadcasters as "right-arm medium". Mayank Agarwal, for one, was tricked.
Bumrah's first ball to Agarwal was back of a length. The batter attempted something between a straight drive and a short-arm jab, looking to pump him back over his head. But he was late on the shot: the ball rushed onto him faster than expected, squirting awkwardly off the bat into Sachin Tendulkar's hands at mid off. For a moment, Agarwal stood at the crease, perplexed. He'd been done by Bumrah's pace. He wouldn't be the last.
Anti-skid
The Agarwal dismissal highlights another salient aspect of Bumrah's bowling. Agarwal had never faced Bumrah before - and would not have been able to get his hands on any video footage either. He was playing him blind.
And while he was late on the stroke, he also played the wrong shot. His shadow batting, straight after the dismissal, illustrated as much: Agarwal immediately realised he should have gone cross-batted, and looked to play over wide mid-on.
The real issue was that the ball bounced more than Agarwal expected - it struck high on the bat, and was too far from the ground to play a controlled straight-batted shot. In hindsight, it was obvious he needed to play with a horizontal bat. But he didn't expect the ball to rise as sharply as it did.
If you're following closely, you might have spotted something strange. Watch Bumrah bowl for any length of time and you'll hear a pundit describe him as "skiddy". It's basic physics, right? Bumrah's late release means the ball starts from a lower height than usual - exacerbated by the fact that he is shorter than the average international seamer. Data suggests Bumrah's regular release point is around 1.96m; whereas a taller bowler, like Marco Jansen, would release the ball from about 20cm higher. This has led many commentators to claim, entirely reasonably, that Bumrah can bowl shorter than most quicks and still challenge the stumps.
That makes sense in theory, but the data doesn't stack up. The following table shows the average height of the ball in metres when it reaches the stumps for balls bowled on good or hard lengths:
This seems counterintuitive. Despite his lower trajectory, Bumrah gets considerably more bounce than the average bowler - around 5cm more when he hits a good length. Kane Williamson tried to explain the paradox:
"It has to skid, doesn't it, when it's coming from that height, at that pace? But it's heavy. When someone bowls a heavy ball, they are getting something out of the surface and it's bouncing on you."
Clearly, Bumrah gets the ball to bounce at a steeper angle than average. Consider the following table, which shows the angle of bounce in degrees. Zero would be a ball that grubbers along the ground; 90 would be a ball that rises vertically with no forward momentum:
So Bumrah is not actually skiddy at all. In fact, he's considerably less skiddy than the average fast bowler. The sharp angle of bounce means he bowls what batters refer to as a "heavy ball" - one that bounces slightly more than you expect, hitting higher up the bat. But how does this happen? The short answer is backspin.
As discussed already, Bumrah's late release causes his arm to be at an unusual angle at the point of delivery: diagonal, rather than pointing vertically towards the sky. This helps with his "wrist flick" - the process whereby fast bowlers pull down on the ball as they release it - since the hand is fully oriented behind the ball. As Felton explains, "rather than being above you, where you're trying to pull from below, he's always pulling from the back of the ball".
You can test this difference with a home experiment. If you place your arm above your head and pull down, you'll notice the motion feels difficult. Now, position your arm diagonally in front of you and try the same. Not only is the motion easier, but it also carries more force. "It's the orientation of the arm at release," Felton says. "When it's out in front of you, you're pulling down on the ball from a stronger position."
The strength of this pulling motion is amplified by Bumrah's long arms and hypermobile wrist, which combine with the elastic elbow joint to create an even stronger whipcord effect. This dramatically changes the equation: consider the force and velocity of a whip, which bends through the air, compared to a stick which has much less elasticity. Bumrah's irregular mechanics allow him to generate much more arm speed than almost every other bowler.
The whipcord arm is arguably the most important aspect of Bumrah's whole action, since it allows him to impart much more backspin than most seamers. This is significant: as Felton puts it, "From the numbers, the better bowlers do get higher backspin." Harshal Patel's observations explain why:
"The first time I looked at him, I knew that, man, this guy has some work on the ball. I've seen a lot of quick bowlers, guys who clock really high numbers on the speed gun, but they don't have a lot of work on the ball - which means that once you get used to that shock of pace, you can kind of get used to playing them.
"Think about a spinner who has so many revolutions on the ball that it will always do something off the surface, even if there isn't much in the pitch. Even if it doesn't turn. Fast bowlers have that same attribute, which is backspin. So if you have a lot of backspin, the ball glides off the surface. Guys who have played ten or 15 years of international cricket aren't afraid of someone bowling 145kph. But if you're at 145kph and have that kind of work on the ball, it makes you almost unbelievable. It's a whole different ball game."
The lavish backspin Bumrah imparts likens his deliveries to slice shots in tennis. They float, meaning they have more upward force - or less downward momentum - than other deliveries of similar speed.
But the heavy slice makes the ball do something unexpected. Everything tells you it is going to bounce low, but instead it sits up. This is because the spin creates extra friction with the pitch, causing the ball to lose forward velocity while largely maintaining vertical momentum.
Again, this upsets the batter's algorithm. A ball bowled at 145kph will reach a batter in about 0.4 seconds. But - studies suggest it takes 0.3 seconds to react to the ball, and another 0.3 seconds for that information to pass from brain to limbs. That poses a problem - 0.6 seconds after release, the ball will already be safe in the keeper's gloves. So, playing fast bowlers requires premeditation.
Much of this plays out through predictive saccadic eye movements - rapid, involuntary motions, which shift the gaze from one focus point to another. When facing fast bowlers, batters make two predictive saccadic movements: one about where they expect the ball to bounce, and the other of where they predict it will make contact with the bat. The best batters make these saccadic movements sooner - they "pick up length early", as the old saying goes.
Of course, Bumrah's trajectory scrambles these saccadic movements. The low release point and pre-bounce trajectory create the impression of skiddiness, but the backspin causes extra bounce. So the ball strikes much higher on the bat than you'd expect. His good-length deliveries may only bounce 5cm more than the average seamer, but they rise considerably higher than you'd expect from a bowler of Bumrah's profile.
Again, you can be aware of this, but you still have to override your internal autopilot. That in itself causes problems: although batters often don't realise it, so much of what they do stems from muscle memory. Bumrah's weirdness makes much of that ineffective.
This is a lightly edited extract from The Boom Effect: Decoding the Magic of Jasprit Bumrah by Aayush Puthran and Nicholas Brookes, Penguin Play, 2026