“I owe my hat-trick to the captain,” Jasprit Bumrah told an enamoured Virat Kohli after blowing away West Indies with his heady cocktail of line and length, pace and bounce. After Bumrah removed one of the West Indies batsmen, Kohli was caught on the stump mic saying: “What a bowler man! What a bowler!”

Part of the credit for Bumrah’s hat-trick goes to skipper Kohli, who insisted on a review after Roston Chase, his third victim, was initially given not out by the on-field umpire, Paul Reiffel. India’s review was upheld as Bumrah became only the third Indian to claim a hat-trick in Tests. “Actually I didn’t know, I was not very sure of the appeal,” Bumrah told Kohli in an ‘interview’ for the BCCI website.

“I thought it was bat so I didn’t appeal so much, but it was a good review in the end. So, I think, I owe that hat-trick to the captain.”
It is not easy to sweep Kohli off his feet, but Bumrah has done that a few times in recent times, and the second day of the second Test against West Indies provided one such instance.

“When there is so much of help from the wicket, you can get greedy, you try to be over-aggressive,” Bumrah said. “At that time, you have to keep things simple, just try and bowl good balls and create pressure. That was the thing that was going on in my head. We saw in the previous innings they were getting a lot of bounce and they were getting late movement as well.”