Bumrah and the Rhino

Ah, but did the team win?

There was a lot of chatter in cricketing circles when India arrived in England for the recent tour and announced that Jasprit Bumrah was only going to play three of the five Tests. Workload management is all the rage these days, but it was still a surprise to hear this. Bumrah is the best bowler in the world. This is one of those instances where the ICC’s cold hard computer, which has him first in the Test bowling rankings, and human observers are in sync. There are few dissenting opinions on that. More discussion arose when some alert statisticians pointed out that, counter-intuitively, India’s record was better when Bumrah didn’t play than when he did. And so it all came to pass: Bumrah played just three Tests. India lost two and drew one of these, and India won both Tests he didn’t play. At the end of the series India’s record in matches that Bumrah has played over his career is 20 wins and 23 losses in 48 Tests while they have won 19 and lost just five of the 27 Tests he has missed.

This reminded me of a stat that I had tracked during Ryan Harris’ career. Harris had the sobriquet “The Rhino” presumably because his physique resembled that powerful animal as much as you could reasonably expect a mere human to. Or, it could just have been that he was ‘Ryan-o’ in true Aussie fashion. Either way, his record was at the other end of the spectrum to Bumrah: Australia did much better when he played than when he didn’t.