To be a great bowler, swing artiste Praveen Kumar wisecracks, “ball ko pyar karna padta hain.” You have to love the ball. He throws the example of his “chhota bhai and parivar”, Bhuvneshwar Kumar. “He is like a devoted lover, takes good care of the ball, keeps one side shining always, removes the dirt from it and keeps it like a treasure,” Praveen tells The Indian Express.
And the ball loves him back. As on Monday night in Delhi and numerous other days and nights in his career nudging two decades. The ball behaved exactly as he willed it to. The movement was scant but sufficient. The batsmen, in a format set to their tunes, for once danced to the bowler’s notes. A bowler once considered too traditional for the shortest format is now among its most revered. He is the most successful fast bowler in IPL history (212 wickets); among contemporary seamers, only Jasprit Bumrah is thriftier (economy 7.68). Bhuvneshwar is the most prolific bowler in IPL Powerplays (88 wickets), with an economy rate of 6.58 to boot. Faster, taller and stronger bowlers have withered.
It’s a ball-bowler romance that began in Meerut nearly 20 years ago; it still endures and manifests on grand stages, surviving seasons, failures and ravages of injuries. “From the first day I saw him, he was fully committed to bowling. He was someone who bowled because he loved to bowl,” Praveen says.
Every time Praveen Kumar watched him bowl, he saw a different dimension of Bhuvneshwar. (AP File Photo)
Summers in Meerut are torrid, winters grey. But Bhuvneshwar hit the nets of the rather spartan Victoria Park unfailingly. “He was always there, learning something or the other. He had an inquisitive mind and observed the minutest things. He learned most of the things by himself. No one taught him how to bowl an out-swinger or in-swinger. He learned it by observing and practising, bowling it all the time,” he says.
The virtues of self-learning were several, Bhuvneshwar detailed in an interview with bcci.tv.
“I had a natural in-swinger when I was young. I kept on bowling it in the nets and one day, I swung the ball the other way. I asked myself what I was doing differently, I started observing the minor changes in run-up, grip and release. Then I figured out what I was doing differently, and you become your own analyst and critic,” he said.
The approach has flaws. Irredeemable mistakes could creep in imperceptibly without expert guidance. But the benefits of learning by yourself, Praveen emphasises, is that it becomes your habit (aadat, the exact word he used).
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“It’s easy when you apply your brain and figure things out by yourself. The things you grasp on your own stay in your mind. You try, you fail, the lessons stay with you,” he says. Like, if he moved the bowling arm away from the ear, the ball would swing away. If it hit his ear, it would nip into the right hander.
The coaches let both Praveen and Bhuvneshwar be. They polished and not reconstructed their actions — both had naturally smooth and repeatable actions too.
Often, the bowlers learn from each other. “Not by talking a lot, but by observing each other, observing great bowlers like Wasim (Akram) bhai or Zak (Zaheer Khan) or Ash (Nehra) bhai, and talking about little things that, in the end, made huge differences. Of course we had coaches and seniors, but a lot of the learning we did it ourselves,” he adds.
Praveen remembers the excitement the first time they watched Zaheer’s knuckle ball.
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“Both of us were fascinated and, of course, we tried the ball the very next day, and failed miserably. But over time, we learned it,” he says. He did not blindly ape Zaheer, but adjusted to suit his game. Zaheer crooked his forefinger behind the ball and flicked it out; Bhuvneshwar bowls it with an upright seam and bends the knuckles of the forefinger and middle finger to hold the seam with the fingertips. The thumb acts like a backrest.
Every time Praveen watched him bowl, he saw a different dimension of Bhuvneshwar. But he was least surprised. He added pace, because swing alone on flat tracks was predictable. He finessed a yorker, a slow bouncer and an off-cutter. He mastered different lengths, so that he could bowl at any stage of the game.
“He is so successful because he is still a wonderful student of the game. It’s not easy, it takes 10-15 years to perfect a delivery,” he says.
The art lies not just in possessing the variations but in understanding when and how to use them. He might get time to set up batsmen with a planned passage of play, but even in this format, he is a (double) bluff master. He ensnared Axar Patel, the Delhi Capitals captain, with a simple three-peat trick. A good length ball outside off-stump that shaped away, a yorker that he played all over and then a back-of-length scorcher that shaped in before tailing away from the left-hander, brushing his edge. He does not telegraph his intentions by a change of action which some do. Nor is there a discernibly different grip. Instead it comes from the wrist.
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Praveen calls it “haath ki kala (sleight of hand)”. But he points out his “sharp dimag (brain)” too.
“He knows everything about a batsman, from his technique to body language, his favourite shots and the field he needs to set. He always bowls to his field, and that is why he is good in the Powerplay,” he says. But at the heart of Bhuvneshwar is his lover’s soul, the unconditional love for the ball and the craft.
