One team had Jasprit Bumrah. The other didn't. And that was that. That was the difference. His legend is littered with incredible displays. But this will feel sweeter, not merely for the fact that it came in a T20 World Cup match against Pakistan, but for the fact that without his intervention this game would have almost certainly had a different ending. India defended 119. Pakistan lost after being 80 for 3. The team is in serious danger of an early exit.

Boom in Blue

Pakistan needed 40 runs off the last 36 balls with seven wickets in hand. Forecasters gave them a 93% chance of victory then. Poor thing. It's been left on the fritz. Bumrah's discipline, his calmness under pressure, his extraordinary skill, not just in delivering the right ball but in understanding what the right ball is, confounded man and machine, alike in New York.

Mohammad Rizwan was made to believe that a full-length ball was there to play a cross-bat shot. His stumps paid the price. Soon after knocking it back, Bumrah spread his arms wide and broke into a smile. That's his usual celebration. But he didn't stop there. He roared. And over 30,000 people at the ground roared with him. He punched the air. Millions joined him. This was the opening that India could build on. This was the crack that would cause the collapse.

The Support Act

India waited until the third over to deploy their super weapon. Then they had to wait until the 15th to bring him back. In between, they relied on others to keep the pressure up and two people in particular did that with aplomb. Hardik Pandya and his short-of-a-length offerings were always going to be a threat on this New York pitch with uneven bounce. He stopped Fakhar Zaman before he could play the kind of cameo that would kill chases like these. And then he took out Shadab Khan. Both times the batters were surprised by how high the ball was when they made contact with it. Hardik wasn’t. He just shrugged, as if to say, ‘yeah, I do that. No big deal’.

Axar Patel was the other unsung hero, bowling the first of the death overs and somehow keeping it to just two runs even though he was up against a left-hand batter with the short boundary on the leg side. Imad Wasim was never allowed to win the match-up as he was fed a diet of non-spinning deliveries that were angled across him and kept bouncing over his cut shots.

Pant Doing Pant things

This was the best pitch to bat on in New York so far. But even that had its perils. Largely in the form of the ball not coming on, and occasionally with uneven bounce. Rizwan and Arshdeep Singh took blows to the hand.

A bit of luck is required in these conditions. Pant got that when he survived three catching opportunities in three balls and later survived an inside edge that could have gone onto the stumps. A bit of bravery helps. Pant showed that when he smashed Haris Rauf over extra cover. A bit of imagination doesn't go amiss either. Pant epitomised that with a flick shot that he played while falling to the floor because that was the only way he knew how to get under a good length ball and put in the gap at fine leg. Later, to Imad's highly accurate left-arm spin, he brought out the standing reverse sweep.

The Footnotes

In the game against USA, Mohammad Amir was all over the place. In this one, he was spot on. Eight of the first 12 deliveries he bowled produced false shots. Early on with the new ball, he beat the bat three times in a row. Later on, with the old one, he was on a hat-trick. Pakistan demoted him to first-change and by the time he came on, India had already lost their two best batters, both Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli caught off balls that stuck in the pitch, a theme that would continue for the rest of the innings. Amir had a soft entry but he made the absolute most of it. His best work coincided with the best phase of the game for Pakistan, when they strung four overs together between the 12th and the 15th where only eight runs were scored and four wickets were taken. India went from 89 for 3 to 96 for 7. At the halfway stage, Pakistan were ahead. Twenty overs later, they were facing elimination, in part because they weren’t the team with Jasprit Bumrah.

Could Mohammad Rizwan have taken more risks? Either way, the target should have been chased. Let me warn you right now. What you’re going to read, you’ve read about before. A lot. If it feels like you’ve been reading about it for, hmmm, the last three hundred years, it’s because you have. Every time, in fact, a big tournament is on the horizon, we’re talking about it. Did it very recently ahead of this big tournament that we’re in right now.

If you’ve spent three years either being for RizBar (and against the middle order) or against RizBar (and for the middle order), what’s one more time? As a refresher, here is a succinct summary of the matter from less than a fortnight ago, from our very own Matt Roller: Rizwan and Babar bat deep, which means the middle order rarely get the chance to face many balls; when they do, the dearth of recent opportunities means they underperform. That, in turn, means that Rizwan and Babar feel the need to get things done themselves; and the middle order’s opportunities are limited once again. What came first, the chicken or the egg?

The specific details from this game are that this time it was Mohammad Rizwan who top-scored for Pakistan with 31. He took 44 balls to do it. He hit one four and one six. He anchored their chase of 120 deep into the innings and when he fell off the first ball of the 15th, Pakistan needed 40 with six wickets in hand. Imad Wasim, Shadab Khan and Iftikhar Ahmed, the lower middle order, combined to make 24 off 39 balls. They hit one boundary between them, a fortuitous edge off Imad’s bat. In the end Pakistan fell short by six runs, with three wickets still in hand and an all too familiar script.

Some of you will argue that Rizwan’s low-risk batting is actually a high-risk approach. To go so deep, to use so much resource and to still not be ahead of the game when you leave, is inherently unfair on the middle order. Could – indeed should – Rizwan not have taken more chances like Rishabh Pant? Could he not have foregone a degree of control and chanced his bat to attempt a few more boundaries? Pant had a control percentage of 50% in his 31-ball 42 and, frankly, even that feels high.

The counter, of course, is that Rizwan had done enough and 40 off 35 balls with six wickets to come should not have been a problem, even on that surface. All it needed was a couple of boundaries between the remaining batters and the pressure would’ve gone. That it didn’t happen is precisely why Rizwan played as he did. None of Imad, Shadab or Iftikhar tried to innovate, or manufacture a shot on a pitch which needed it. Indeed, it is an indictment that it took Naseem Shah to show the way, scooping Arshdeep Singh in the final over by when it was already too late.

At one stage, across the 16th and 17th over, Imad’s shot options seemed to have whittled down to the solitary one: a cut square. Only he could barely connect. In the penultimate over, Bumrah bowled two full tosses to Iftikhar. Numbers show that Bumrah’s full tosses are harder to hit than most, but these were probably not those ones, the low ones that miss a Yorker-length marginally. These were thigh-high gimmes, angling right into Iftikhar’s wheelhouse. He swung at both, got a leg bye off the first and was dismissed off the second, hitting high but not getting close to the midwicket boundary. These are familiar scenes of failure, just different names. Imad, Shadab, Iftikhar today, Haider Ali, Asif Ali, Khushdil Shah, Azam Khan over the last few years.

Which seems like a really obvious take, but after a game in which they failed to chase 120 it hits home like a new, revelatory truth. RizBar are consistent but low-impact openers whose low impact is hidden behind any number of pointless batting records (Most runs! Quickest to so-and-so-thousand runs! Highest average! Most century stands!). And the middle order is a long list of faceless, revolving failure. Different approaches, different philosophies, old hands, newbies, returnees, reinvented hitters, allrounders, specialists, finishers, but no solution to a continuing problem.