“I said to Jasprit: ‘You should not change your action. That is your weapon. Don’t change anything about it. You can change your line and length, where you aim the ball. But this is your original action, it’s natural. And you never change natural.’”
Kishore Trivedi is talking about his most famous student, the unique, irrepressible Jasprit Bumrah.
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I am chasing the backstory of Bumrah and his one-of-a-kind bowling action around the city of his birth, Ahmedabad. The journey takes me to the block of flats he grew up in, the yard he practised in, and even for a ride through the city with Mehmood, the tuk-tuk driver who ferried Bumrah (and his family) around in his teen years.
The magic of Bumrah has been on full display during India’s tour of England. He has played just two matches, but has taken five-wicket hauls in each, earning a place on the Lord’s honours board last week.
It leaves him with 217 wickets at an average of 19.48. No man has more Test wickets at a better average and he has a host of white-ball accolades, too. It has led to Michael Vaughan describing him as the greatest fast bowler he has seen, and to Telegraph Sport’s Scyld Berry, veteran of more than 500 Tests, to anoint him the best ever.
But Trivedi is speaking half a world away from Lord’s, just after 9am on a Tuesday in February, and it is already steaming hot. Not that you would know it is when meeting him. He is wearing a full tracksuit, and an ear-warming headband under a beanie hat, which he only removes to have his photo taken. Trivedi’s WhatsApp profile picture is him with his handsome St Bernard, Leo. It is hard to know who is wearing the warmer coat.
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We are in the west of the city, at Trivedi’s Royal Cricket Academy, which appears through a small, dusty opening between shanty housing, and is overlooked on the other side by high rises.
Kishore Trivedi at the Royal Cricket Academy
Trivedi has rented this space for seven years, and it is rudimentary, with a small, unwalled changing area covered by a tin roof providing the only shade, and storage for kit.
Some of the 25 or so students, paying a monthly 2,500 rupees (£21.70, but discounts are given to those who cannot afford it) for daily sessions, break from nets to watch us chat. Stray dogs roam the rough outfield, which is being worked on by an assistant under the watchful eye of Trivedi. In the distance, horns blare.
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I have been told that Trivedi is the man to talk to about Bumrah’s development, and he makes for compelling company.
He has been a coach for almost 40 years, but before that played four Ranji Trophy matches in 1972-73 as an off-spinner for Saurashtra, based in Gujarat. He beams with pride as he tells me his first wicket was none other than Sunil Gavaskar, bowled. He bristles when I ask if he could bat as well.
Trivedi surveys the pitch at the Royal Cricket Academy in Ahmedabad
“Bowlers did not need to make runs,” he scoffs. “The job was to take wickets”. The glowing pride returns as he tells me about his son, Siddharth, a fast bowler who followed him in representing Saurashtra, and played the first few seasons of the Indian Premier League for Rajasthan Royals, and is still the franchise’s third-highest wicket-taker.
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But perhaps he is most proud of his role in the story of Bumrah who, in a neat quirk, actually played in Siddharth’s last professional match, a T20 between Saurashtra and Gujarat in March 2015.
The following year, Bumrah played for India for the first time and has since become one of the greatest bowlers to play the game. No bowler has more Test wickets than the 31-year-old at a lower average and there is a case for him to have a place in a fantasy greatest XI of all time.
The conversation is not entirely two-way. Trivedi’s students, who range in age from under 10 to late teens, are involved, in a very endearing fashion. All of them dream of playing professionally, and have an unquenchable appetite for the game. They tease me about England’s performance on tour in India, and warn me that India will win the final ODI the following day (they turn out to be right).
As he nips off to answer his phone, I ask one how old he thinks Trivedi is. He responds with a cheeky grin, and says 84. Another says 86. Trivedi later corrects the record: he is 76. Another teenage student, Arnav, speaks immaculate English, and chips in to translate when required.
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‘They thought he was throwing it’
Bumrah was like them when Trivedi first met him, aged 16 and mustard keen. Trivedi was holding a session at nearby Nirman High School, where Bumrah was a student and his mother, Daljit, taught. Bumrah, at this time, was new to organised cricket, having not been especially young when he first played. Trivedi was the autodidact’s first serious coach.
Bumrah’s unusual action, pictured here in 2017, aroused suspicion from his peers – AP/Kirsty Wigglesworth
“I started my cricket quite late. I didn’t play when I was six or seven,” he told Australian network Fox in December. “I watched the television, and had no formal coaching. I learnt everything through the television and somehow picked up cues and kept on finding my own solutions.”
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Trivedi remembers the boy who came to his sessions.
“When Jasprit first came to the nets, he had this odd action,” he says. “The boys were confused. They were asking me, is he throwing it or is this a correct action? They thought he was throwing it. I observed his action closely for three days. It was absolutely fine, there was nothing ‘chuck’ about it.
“It’s an odd action, so the boys were confused. But I was also surprised at how much speed he could generate at 16. His run-up was 10 or 12 yards, but he generated so much speed, so the boys were afraid to face him, because it was bouncing so much. And already, he could bowl a very good yorker.”
An hour later, I am just over 6km away and stood outside the building Bumrah credits for his idiosyncratic run-up, that fearsome yorker and his ability to bamboozle batsmen. Goyal Intercity is a series of grey blocks, tucked away behind a row of shops that could be anywhere in India: grocers, pharmacies and so on.
Goyal Intercity, the housing blocks where Bumrah was raised
The Bumrahs lived on the sixth floor of block A3. It was in apartment 63 that he first perfected the full-pitched delivery – for entirely pragmatic reasons.
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“Summers in India can be really hot in the afternoon and parents don’t let kids out,” he told The Guardian last year. “I was a hyperactive kid, lots of energy, but my mother would sleep in the afternoon… I found that if I bowled a ball into the skirting board, it didn’t make a sound. So I could bowl without disturbing her, no issues.”
There is scant evidence of the Bumrahs here now, although residents tell me they have kept the apartment for sentimental reasons, and it sits locked.
Out the back, there is a yard for residents to sit in relative peace, and for kids to play. It is big enough for a decent game of cricket, but a series of benches acted as a boundary, limiting the young Jasprit’s run-up.
The yard where Bumrah learnt his trade
“The run-up is because of playing in the backyard,” Bumrah said in 2020. “We didn’t have a lot of space when I used to play as a child. This was the longest run-up you could have.
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“There were benches. I couldn’t go any further than that. That was the limit we had, so we kept it as a boundary. I ran in from there.”
The run-up stuck. “When I came into serious cricket, I tried to run more,” Bumrah told Fox. “Initially I did, but it didn’t make any difference, my pace stayed the same. It made no difference, so I kept it the same.”
Not that Bumrah realised his action was unusual. “It wasn’t until I joined a national junior camp and saw a video of myself [that I saw I was different],” he told the Guardian. “I was just bowling fast and taking wickets, it never occurred to me.”
Father died when he was five
Outside, a couple of security guards mill around the gate, and the vehicles in the parking lot tell a tale: there are hundreds of motorbikes, as there are everywhere in India, but some fancy cars, too.
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I get chatting to a resident, who has moved here since the Bumrah family left. “This is a nice place to live,” he tells me. “Normal people, and a very mixed society. People get on well”.
That much is clear. The atmosphere is convivial and friendly. In the course of an hour or so, I see Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs (the Bumrah family are Gujarati Sikh).
India is a rapidly-changing country and as the home of the Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, Ahmedabad is one of the fastest-growing cities in the world. One of Bumrah’s closest friends, the former cricketer Manprit Juneja, describes it as a “goldilocks situation”, where a well-educated population and a stable government are combining to make the city a “hot-spot for investors”. He adds: “There’s a huge business community that keeps multiplying, and development is twice the pace of other Indian cities”.
Ahmedabad is one of India’s fastest-growing cities – Bloomberg/Elke Scholiers
Middle India is expanding fast, and the setting of Bumrah’s childhood feels right at its heart, but that does not mean his upbringing was without struggle. His father, Jasbir, died of Hepatitis B when Jasprit was five, leaving Daljit to raise him and his sister, Juhika.
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‘He comes from a humble background’
Juneja remains a close friend of Bumrah, who has known him for around 15 years, since his early days in the Gujarat system. The pair have family links that run even further back. Juneja is a retired cricketer who was a batting stalwart for their state, and played for India A and India U23 with Bumrah.
“He comes from a very humble background,” Juneja says. “They had a tough time in their childhood financially, because his mum had to take care of two children alone. It’s not been very easy for them.”
Daljit’s best friend, a well-regarded journalist called Deepal Trivedi (no relation to Kishor), was a neighbour in the early years of Jasprit’s life. When he guided India to T20 World Cup triumph last year, an Instagram post of hers did the rounds in the Indian media. She wrote of those years: “We could hardly afford him a packet of Amul Dairy or any milk. We were all busy struggling to meet ends as he grew up. His mother worked at least 16-18 hours a day”.
Bumrah is a crucial part of India’s white and red-ball cricket teams – AP/Adam Hunger
As you would expect of someone with that work ethic, who rose to become the vice-principal of a big secondary school, Daljit took education seriously. Trivedi, the coach, remembers a conversation with her soon after he met Jasprit.
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“She was the vice-principal [at Nirman],” he says. “He had been training with me, but his mother came to me and said ‘Jasprit likes cricket too much. He doesn’t study enough’. She was worried and wondered how he would have a career. I said to his mother, ‘don’t worry, leave Jasprit with me for three years’. He definitely has the talent, so if he puts the time in, he has a future in cricket.”
Daljit agreed, so the young Jasprit trained with Trivedi for two hours from 4.30pm every day of the week.
“I was clear with what I thought about his action,” he said. “So many boys are changing their action, so many coaches trying to change them. But I gave my advice: don’t change.”
He begins to mimic Bumrah’s action, splaying his left arm high. “Because the front hand is there,” he says, before swinging his right arm through with dynamism. “Then he comes through like that.”
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He continues: “We trained constantly. Lots of different types of training, line and length, accuracy. To improve his yorkers, we did spot bowling. We would choose an area, a very small target, the size of the ball. He would have to hit it, 10 to 15 times in a row. I would reward him or punish him if he did well or badly. One hour bowling was compulsory. No water, no rest, every day until he kept hitting it. His accuracy increased, so the number of times he missed decreased.”
Trivedi remembers a “very shy boy, who didn’t speak much and was not open at all”. What he did possess, though, was steely confidence that grew as his cricket improved. “He was serious and sincere about the game,” he adds.
“He was the best teenager I have seen,” Trivedi remembers. “He was different to all others, in his behaviour, his bowling action. He was very shy”.
So Trivedi used his contacts in the Gujarati game to expose him to steps up the playing ladder, and asked a lot of him: Not only daily training sessions, but lots of matches of increasing quality, from school cricket to district, then state age-group level.
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‘Batsmen are still confused!’
Transporting Bumrah around the city to all this cricket was Mehmood, who just happens to be standing by his auto-rickshaw outside the gates of Goyal as I look around. Residents insist I meet him and, before long, for 300 rupees (about £2.60, which includes a 50 per cent tip) we are zooming to all the spots he would take the young Bumrah. Mehmood speaks more English than I do Gujarati, and works hard to point out every Bumrah-related place, from vegetarian eateries to cricket pavilions.
Mehmood, who was Bumrah’s driver, and his tuk-tuk
We stop at Nirman High School, where kids in white T-shirts are doing laps of the yard, and pass Vastrapur Lake, which looks pretty (Mehmood has his foot down, so it is hard to fully appreciate it). We pass Eklavya Sports Stadium, where Bumrah would train, and wind up at the College Commerce Ground, where he would play. Students are knocking about on their lunch break, there are some military drills happening, but no cricket. Buzzing through the streets gives a sense of Ahmedabad’s rapid change: the roads are smoother, and better regulated, than other parts of India, and fancy malls and apartment blocks seem to pop up around each corner.
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Working under Trivedi, the pace of change for Bumrah was rapid, too. By March 2013, aged 19, he was playing for Gujarat in the T20 Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, alongside Juneja (who was in the XI for his T20, List A and first-class debuts). “I had never seen anything like him,” he remembers. “He was unusual, unorthodox, with his real strength being that he didn’t seem as quick as he was.”
During that tournament, his yorkers were spotted by John Wright, the former New Zealand captain, in his new role as Mumbai Indians head coach. Wright was watching Bumrah on the advice of Parthiv Patel, the Indian wicketkeeper who captained Gujarat. A month later, Bumrah was playing in the IPL, the competition which would make him one of Ahmedabad’s finest and most precious exports.
“Today, he has the rewards for the odd action,” says Trivedi. “Batsmen are still confused!”. Juneja believes there have been some “very small tweaks” to his great friend’s action since they first played together, but “the jerk and the swift movement” that make him so unusual have remained exactly the same.
Over to our left, in the nets, one of the boys is impersonating that action. “They all try,” laughs Trivedi. “But it never works, because he is unique.”
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