Jasprit Bumrah, who on Saturday (August 31) became only the third Indian to bag a hat-trick, has credited his captain Virat Kohli for having achieved the feat.
Bumrah, who had dismissed Darren Bravo and Shamarh Brooks off consecutive deliveries of his ninth over, managed to rap Roston Chase on his pads with an inswinging delivery. However, after the on-field umpire had turned down the appeal, the pacer didn’t seem too convinced to go for a review. Kohli, on the other hand, kept yelling from third slip “Pehle pad pe laga hai (It has hit the pad first)”, and decided to take the review. As it turned out, the decision was reversed and Bumrah became only the third Indian after Harbhajan Singh (vs Australia in 2001) and Irfan Pathan (vs Pakistan in 2006) to bag a Test hat-trick.
“Actually I didn’t know. I was not very sure of the appeal,” Bumrah in an interview to bcci.tv. “I thought it was bat [first], so I didn’t appeal so much. But it was a good review in the end (laughs), and I think I owe the hat-trick to the captain.”
Explaining the sequence of events, Kohli said, “Yeah, we had a discussion. I asked him what he thinks; whether he thought the guy has hit it. So the only question was is the ball in line, and he said, ‘Everything is in front of the wickets; it’s just that I think it’s bat.’ So we all discussed; Jinx [Ajinkya Rahane] both thought he [Chase] is late on the ball, so we went for the review and it happened to be on the right side.”
Bumrah’s spell of 6 for 16 on the second day at the Sabina Park left West Indies vulnerably placed at 87 for 7 in response to India’s 416 in the second Test. It was his second consecutive fifer in this series, both of which rattled the top order in no time.
Speaking about the success of the Indian pace pack in recent times, Bumrah said, “There’s a lot of communication that goes on the field as well. When I’m getting wickets, it’s somebody else’s job to create pressure, and when somebody else is getting wickets, [it’s] my job is to create pressure. There’s a lot of communication [even] when there is no help [from the surface about] what we can do.
“Ishant, as you have seen, has played 90 (odd) Test matches, Shami has played a lot of Test matches. So a lot of communication goes [on], ideas come in, we try to help each other out whenever things are not going well, we try to push each other. So there’s a good relation going on and, hopefully, from here we will continue.”
