Despite being one of India’s premier fast bowlers in the not so distant past, Bhuvneshwar Kumar has a hidden truth that has plagued his entire career. In all seriousness though, there really is no hidden secret or unfortunate truth to Bhuvi that will leave everybody in utter shock. It’s just a problem that seems to be overlooked if anything due to the fact that he hasn’t really surfaced in international cricket for well over a year now. The last time he had played in a match was the 2022 T20 World Cup, which in cricketing years seems like an eternity ago. All in all, what exactly is or in this case “was” the problem then? In simple terms, he lacked wickets and a lot of them.However, the real question that needs to be asked here is why? And while there maybe no true answer to that question, one can hint at the fact that the team management during the time was just way too conservative with their game-planning and that could’ve affected Kumar’s ability to be a more aggressive bowler throughout his career.
Mohammed Shami vs. Bhuvneswar Kumar Career Comparison
Above is a comparison of Shami’s career stats (top) to Kumar’s career stats (bottom). One statistic that does not show up here is the amount of 4 wicket hauls and 5 wicket hauls each bowler had for each format of the game. After taking a closer look, Kumar has a 5 – wicket haul in all formats of the game including the IPL and Shami seems to have multiple 5 – wicket hauls in both the ODI and Test formats of the game, however he has zero of them in the IPL or the t20 format of that game. As seen above, Bhuvneshwar Kumar’s inability to take wickets in the ODI format is pretty evident when stacking it up against Shami’s. Shami played around 100 innings and picked up 195 wickets while Kumar managed to pick up a mere 141 wickets despite playing in almost 20 more innings, which is a staggering 20% more sample size in overall career innings. Just to put this in perspective, if Shami played in the same amount of ODIs as Kumar, he would’ve roughly had around 234 wickets assuming he stuck to his career average of taking close to 2 wickets per game. That is almost 100 wickets more than where Kumar stands now.
While the past should be left in the past, there is without doubt that India’s conservative game planning led them to be very passive, not just because of the shortcomings of one bowler, but mainly due to the outcomes for India in major ICC tournaments and/or ODI series, especially around the time of the 2019 ODI World Cup. With that being said, this can by far be called a mistake on the behalf of the national selection committee, but it is not something they can’t learn from. What do you guys think?