Test cricket at its best as Bumrah steps up again, then over-steps

This was the first day of the rest of Sam Konstas’s cricket life. The tyro opener wasn’t even trying to do anything funky when Jasprit Bumrah sheared through his half-defence. Konstas gave Bumrah something to think about in the first innings, Bumrah returned serve in the second. That’s Test cricket.

Bumrah added three further wickets in a devastating mid-afternoon burst, giving this day its shape and direction, but finished it in a counterintuitive pose of hands-on-knees abjection as he cost himself a wicket with a no ball in the last over and perhaps lost India’s last foothold in the match, too. That’s also Test cricket.

Jasprit Bumrah electrified India’s late charge in the Boxing Day Test, but left the field dejected after a no ball he bowled cost India the wicket of Nathan Lyon. Credit: Getty Images

This match, this series, is turning into a kind of mini halcyon day for the game. Konstas and Bumrah are playing their different parts along with many others by further broadening the horizons of what was already the format with the richest possibilities. Now they’re wider and more tantalising again.

Fans are lapping this up. With a good and possibly epic day to come (at a discount price, too), the aggregate is already nearly 300,000, a Boxing Day Test record, harking back in sepia to a time when there was cricket but only cricket for the public’s delectation. The Indian diaspora makes up half, of course, but that’s to celebrate, for assuredly they will be back.

Click here to read article