Former Australia captain Allan Border has praised the Indian pace bowling unit, calling it an improvement of leaps and bounds from the days when India used to play three-four spinners even on pace-friendly wickets.
“India really needed to develop some fast bowlers, didn’t they? Every time they toured anywhere, they were presented with grassy pitches, pace-friendly pitches. So the days of playing three or four spinners are long gone,” Border told Australia’s Cricket Network.
The World Cup-winning skipper was in awe of Indian pace sensation Jasprit Bumrah. “It’s incredible, his rise through the ranks just out of, probably, IPL. It started there and he has just taken the world of cricket by storm,” he said.
The 65-year-old then went on to say that Bumrah has actually out-guessed everyone with his fitness. “He has an unusual action. Everyone thought he is going to struggle with injuries and things like that. (Yet), he has (only) had a little bit of a niggle of late.”
Calling Bumrah a purely ‘Indian Thing’ while describing his unusual action, Border, who played 156 Tests for Australia and scored more than 11,000 runs, remarked, “He is the real deal, isn’t he? He just has the awkward action but he bowls at a good pace, so not the classical way of doing things. It is very much an Indian thing really. They just let the kids develop their own styles.”
Bumrah is the fastest Indian speedster to take 50 Test wickets. He achieved the feat in just 11 matches.
The first Test between Australia and India begins on 17th December in Adelaide and if the warm-up match is anything to go by, the Pink ball can cause real damage to the Aussies as all the four Indian pacers in Bumrah, Mohammed Shami, Navdeep Saini, and Mohammed Siraj have wreaked havoc with it so far.
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