Jasprit Bumrah’s impossible unorthodoxy helps India see off South Africa in their opening World Cup match

Jasprit Bumrah runs in like someone who doesn’t really want to bowl. Like he’s doing it for a dare that he now deeply regrets. Like this might all be an elaborate trap, and he half-expects a spring-loaded comedy boxing glove to appear out of nowhere and smack him in the face at any moment. The first few paces are walked. The next few are reluctantly skipped. It is 14 strides before he so much as breaks into a jog. By this point he’s almost at the crease, and yet in those crucial last few yards lie the essence of the greatest bowling talent currently operating in the world today.

Bumrah’s sporting hero, you may be surprised to learn, is Zlatan Ibrahimovic. According to his colleagues on the Indian team, he can recite his autobiography I Am Zlatan virtually cover to cover. And on the surface, it may seem like an unlikely devotion: the brash, cartoonish alpha striker from Malmo and the quiet bespectacled middle-class kid from Ahmedabad. But what they offer on the field on the play is in fact extremely similar: an unconventional, borderline apostate brilliance, a natural unorthodoxy that provides the illusion of caprice but which has in fact been honed by hours of pure practice. It’s unpredictable, sure. But only to the rest of us.

The mechanics of Bumrah’s unusual action are remarkably sound, broadly repeatable, and yet almost impossible to deconstruct. The right arm is high, almost comically high, but you can’t follow the ball out of it, because it doesn’t move like any human arm you’ve seen before. It seems almost to twist around him, the shoulders tilted, the ball delivered from directly above the head. The elbow hyper-extends, delaying the release for a crucial fraction of a second. And here’s the thing: you can’t even line up his release point, because it’s constantly shifting across the crease, one ball Makhaya Ntini, the next ball Brett Lee, the next Waqar Younis, a visual collage of all the great fast bowlers that Bumrah would watch goggle-eyed in his front room as a cricket-obsessed child.

So to describe Bumrah as the world’s greatest all-format fast bowler - an accolade that only Kagiso Rabada would seriously challenge - is actually an oversimplification. Bumrah isn’t just one of the world’s great fast bowlers, he’s several of them: a gun with the shiny red ball, a surgeon with the hard white, a superb enforcer in the middle overs and the finest death bowler in the sport. His yorker - which he honed by bowling against the skirting board in his house so as not to wake his mother from her nap, is tough to spot and even tougher to play. And here, as South Africa crumbled to their third straight defeat at a cold and hostile Rose Bowl, Bumrah was again the chief tormentor, cycling through his many masks and delivering three varying spells of uniform mastery.

In his first, which removed both openers, Bumrah went hunting for wickets. First he forced Hashim Amla and Quinton de Kock back with an awkward, juddering length; then he tempted them with fuller, wider deliveries to a packed slip cordon. Under most circumstances, the ball that dismissed De Kock would have flown to the boundary for four. But here, by dint of instinct as much as anything else, Bumrah and his captain Virat Kohli sniffed an opening, and so Kohli took himself out of the covers and stationed himself at third slip. The very next ball, De Kock reached for a wider delivery and got a thick edge: a plan immaculate in both conception and execution.

By the time Bumrah returned in the 29th over, the brief had changed. David Miller and Andile Phehlukwayo were beginning to settle, and so Bumrah’s job was to contain. He bowled shorter and straighter, attacking the splice, cramping the batsmen for room. Two overs produced just six runs.

And so to the final stretch, which is where Bumrah really earns his keep. In most match situations, even though Bumrah subtly varies his angle and release, you can generally have a good guess at where the ball might be delivered. In the death overs, you have no clue. It could be one of those searing yorkers, the kind that earned him his first game for Gujurat when he broke the toe of his main fast-bowling rival in the nets. It could be the sort of bouncer you only really clock when it’s right in front of your terrified face. Or it could be the expertly delivered slower ball, the ball floating out of the tips of his fingers with a conjuror’s sleight and a showman’s timing. Or it could be something else. You can take a guess. But a guess is all it would be.

Bumrah wasn’t the only star of India’s opening victory. Their two wrist-spinners did most of the damage in the middle overs. Back in India, a public in thrall to its great batsmen, Rohit Sharma’s unbeaten century will dominate the mass media. And if you took a cursory glance at the scorecard, you’d probably gloss over Bumrah’s 2-35 off 10 overs, his tidy economy rate, his 41 dot balls out of 60. You might even forget that this was his first ever game in a World Cup, the next spectacular frontier in an international career that is still only three years old.

But on a chilly morning in Southampton, with India a little rusty and early breakthroughs an imperative, Bumrah set the game up, and may well have set India’s tournament up too. In an age when white-ball bowlers are being stretched and tested like never before, Bumrah inverts the customary relationship between hunter and hunted: shuffling in, lining you up, unleashing pure havoc.

You may not know what’s coming. But he does.