The slower delivery Jasprit Bumrah bowled to dismiss Ryan Rickleton is worth multiple looks while picking the jaw dropped to the ground — not just for what happened, but for how it happened.
He didn’t bowl it like an off break, fingers cutting across the seam. He didn’t split his fingers wide on either side, the way Craig McDermott once pioneered, borrowing from baseball pitchers. He didn’t bury it deep in the palm, or undercut it for that floaty, dipping Dwayne Bravo special. His fingers on the ball looked, to all appearances, exactly as they always do.
But then he does one remarkable thing: he snaps his wrist sideways at the last instant. That single act accomplishes everything. It preserves his arm speed — deception, check. It keeps his fingers from cutting across the seam like conventional slower balls — concealment, check. And because it happens so late, the arm still comes over high and fast, stripping the batsman of any cue, any moment to recalibrate. Illusion of time, gone.
Slower ball does the trick 🪄
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As the right arm rolls over, comes that fierce sideways-snap — as if turning a doorknob. For Rickleton, it opened the door to a nightmare. He was so dumbfounded he could only pop a dolly to mid-off.
What makes it brilliant is that it’s logical — but only for Bumrah. That hyper-extended elbow, that unusual release point: the doorknob twist isn’t a trick. It’s an extension. Why telegraph with a conventional off-break action when you can simply let the wrist do something strange and invisible at the very last instant?
And when he wants more, he goes further — releasing the ball as if squeezing a lemon. Which is precisely what he did to Shaun Marsh on the last ball before lunch in the 2018 Boxing Day Test. The ball dropped sharply, as if gravity had issued Marsh a personal reminder.
This one to Rickleton was a gentler squeeze, but the snap-wrist rotation still imparted enough revs — with identical arm speed, identical action — that the ball slowed, turned, and did its damage all the same.
