Bumrah on the Lord’s brouhaha
India have won the toss and chose to bat first (more on that soon), but while those details come through, Bumrah has spoken to Sky about the exchanges at Headingley. Here’s what he had to say.
I really don’t want to go into the details, but when we play sport it is never really intentional that we want to really hurt the batsman or trying to aim to hit the batsman. That was our tactic to get the batsman our or get the lower order out because when we usually go to Australia or South Africa this is what happens.
But as soon as the day (Day 3) got over we were going back some of the words were exchanged. And we were really not happy. The exchanges were really not pleasant. I did not hear at that time because I was really tired after a long day, so couldn’t really hear what was going on, but all my teammates heard. Usually I’m a person who doesn’t go looking for a fight. But when I heard what was said I got riled up.
Then I said if something has come up I wouldn’t really back down and stay down. If something comes up I will give 10 times back. So everybody was really charged up and was really looking for a fight, if now something happens we won’t back down and we’ll go really hard. But not to lose shape because we are here to do a job. We don’t really want to talk and not make an impact.
So we were really using that fire to our advantage and then wanted make a result out of it. That eventually happened. We were really motivated and determined, everybody was together, we were really in everybody else’s faces, really going hard. I think that really worked in our favour. If at all anything (like that) comes in the future that will obviously be used in the same manner. And that fire will be used in the same direction.
How much fire will we get at Headingley?
Waddup? Welcome to the Live Report for Test #3 folks. One of the big questions leading in to the Test is whether England can bounce back after being decked so dramatically on day five at Lords. They went into that final day thinking they had a good chance of winning the Test. Then Jasprit Bumrah and Mohammad Shami – who were on the end of some hostile bowling early in the day – put on a rapid partnership to knock the wind out of England’s chest. Then they bowled the hosts out.
The last three days of that Test saw words being exchanged between various England and India players. At the end of day three, James Anderson was involved in tense discussions with Bumrah in particular, as they went off the ground. Over the last few days, Anderson has conceded that perhaps the rancour from day three had influenced some poor decision-making from England on day five – when they tried to unsettle Bumrah with bouncers, rather than get him out.
“When Joe [Root] touched on getting a few things wrong I think potentially the minute Bumrah came in he brought Mark Wood on and took me off. I think that’s the sort of thing he was talking about as in letting the emotion get the better of us.
“That was the sort of, ‘right, it’s time for him have a taste of his own medicine’ type of thing rather than trying to get him out. You could keep me on and just me trying to just get him out normally and see if he plays any big shots whereas he went with Mark Wood straightaway.
“They are a passionate side, they use emotion differently to how we use it. They channel it well. We saw it on the last day. So that’s something we’ve got to think about going into the last three games.”
Is there more tension in store for us at Headingley? What’s a Big Three series these days without big-ego histrionics?
We’ll have the toss for you shortly, anyway.
Andrew Fidel Fernando is ESPNcricinfo’s Sri Lanka correspondent. @afidelf
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