Jasprit Bumra cricketer of the year

Jasprit Bumrah was a member of the Wisden men's Test XI of 2024, receiving 100 per cent votes from every member of the 41-strong selection panel. He was also named ICC's men's Test cricketer of the year as well as men's cricketer of the year. Aadya Sharma profiles Bumrah's magical 2024.

This article first appeared in issue 84 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to buy in print or digital form here.

It’s mad to think that Jasprit Bumrah is yet to complete a decade in international cricket and already finds himself comfortably in all-time great category. An outlier in India’s thin lineage of fast-bowling superstars, he is undoubtedly among India’s greatest match-winners, a line up historically ruled by batters.

Bumrah’s eminence finds a sweet spot between statistical and aesthetic brilliance. By pure numbers, 2024 was his best year yet. He played more Tests than he had done previously in a calendar year and decorated his cabinet with his first ICC trophy, scooping the Player of the Tournament award at the T20 World Cup.

His year started with England’s tour to India, where he hijacked the expected battle between home spinners and visiting bats. Two of his dismissals are hard to forget: the nightmarish reverse-swinging yorker to topple Ollie Pope in Vizag and, later that same day, castling Ben Stokes with an inducker that led England’s captain to drop his bat in awe.

Also read: 2024 in review: Wisden Cricket Monthly's men's Test XI of the year

Bumrah played no ODIs all year, but eight games at the T20 World Cup were enough to satiate his whiteball cravings. He averaged a ridiculous 8.26 in the competition, swinging the final in India’s favour with a devastating late salvo.

He was also among the top three wicket takers at the IPL, his economy (6.48) unmatched by anyone with more than one wicket, and this in a record-breaking year when the average runs per over stood at 9.56. As always, he excelled at slipping in the slower one as much as the 90mph toe-crushing thunderbolts. The pinpoint yorker was a homemade mechanism a young Bumrah employed to escape the wrath of his mother, practising to hit the edge between the wall and the floor outside his home so as not to make any noise. Today, those rigid arms rotate overtime to inspire millions of youngsters.