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As Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli struggled to find form in 2024, Jasprit Bumrah shone up and above the world.
Virat Kohli, Jasprit Bumrah and Rohit Sharma.
It’s a shame that Jasprit Bumrah is 31 years old while Rohit Sharma and Virat Kohli are 37 and 36, respectively. 2024 was the last year Indian cricket saw three of its greatest superstars play together across formats. And what a thrill these 12 months were.
Home Tests against England’s ‘BazBall’, the inaugural World Test Championship Final foes New Zealand and Bangladesh, a T20 World Cup in the USA and the West Indies and four classic Tests of an away Border-Gavaskar Trophy in Australia — it doesn’t get much better than that. And yes, we’ll ignore the three ODIs against Sri Lanka, for now.
Zooming out, 2024 was a year where the inevitability and the legend of Rohit-Kohli started to fade away, as Bumrah emerged the Bahubali holding the Men in Blue on his broad shoulders. The two batting legends bid adieu to T20Is and by the time of their last appearance of the year, it seemed like a Test retirement won’t be too far either.
As Indian cricket’s ‘transition’ becomes ‘moving on’, 2024 will become a pivotal year for historians. It’ll be looked back at to see what went right and wrong, what were the final signs of vintage before age caught up with two batters who divided India as much as they united it, and how a bowler rose to make sure Indian cricket remained intact in the meantime.
This was the Big Three’s 2024:
Although he had been in the job for a long time in the IPL and then some for India, Rohit got the true taste of the good, bad, and ugly of Indian captaincy in 2024.
It started for him as well as it could’ve — a 4-1 thumping of Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes’ outspoken and BazBalling Test side at home was his peak as a Test captain. It helped that he scored a century and a fifty and his stocks couldn’t have been higher.
A bad IPL season, personally and for Mumbai Indians, filled with needless off-field drama threatened to put the brakes on his burgeoning image. But he reversed all that by leading India to its much, much-awaited ICC title, the T20 World Cup.
There was a kiss on the cheek to Hardik Pandya, there was a photo of him putting the Indian flag into the ground, there were many pictures with Kohli — he had answered questions on his T20 abilities, captaincy and everything in between that the best possible manner.
So in the first half, India had not only won two major trophies but also he and Rahul Dravid had taken giant steps towards the future. They introduced new players in Tests and left T20Is in the mintest possible health, with a clear pathway for the new captain and coach.
His name was gilded in history and after white-washing Bangladesh at home under the new head coach Gautam Gambhir, it seemed like India and Rohit could do no wrong in 2024. But then it unraveled, just when nobody, especially Rohit, wouldn’t have expected it to.
Sri Lanka torched India 2-1 at their home after two decades and started a cycle of negative records. Soon, his defense was being repeatedly breached by New Zealand and runs abandoned him. Whatever had worked for his captaincy so far, no longer did anymore.
A disconnect between the skipper’s needs on the field and the coach’s ideas in the backroom seemed palpable and India suffered its first series whitewash in Tests at home — suddenly, the golden letters threatened to turn grey.
Rohit then had the brightest moment of his year — a baby boy, a gift of off-field sunshine. But on the field, his luck didn’t change. He went to Australia in the second Test in Adelaide with India 1-0 up but at the end of the year, India were 2-1 down. Runs still didn’t come and looked even more difficult to happen, with a high score of 10 in five innings.
A year that started with him getting shouts for having a MS Dhoni-esque impact on Indian white-ball cricket, ended with calls for him to give up Tests mid-way through a series like the legendary ‘keeper. He might do that after the Sydney Test, if reports are to be believed, but it’s unlikely that he’d get an end to his Test career as beautiful as the T20Is.
It would be wrong to blame India’s Test misfortune entirely on Rohit, even if the skipper would feel he could’ve done more. He would retire with the monkey of ICC trophies off his back but another of historic Test losses forever clutching him strongly — important and imperfect at the same time.
Virat Kohli: Outside Off, Outside The Team?
Important yet imperfect would be how Kohli would define his 2024, too. There’s a general hatred among the Indian cricketing audience for clubbing him with Rohit, who had a modest Test career in comparison, but in 2024, they can’t be but clubbed.
Like Rohit, Kohli’s brightest spot was his scratchy Player of the Match performance in the T20 World Cup final. Outside of that, typically good knocks, big knocks, big headline-worthy chases, big stats about his average, and big ICC ranking jumps, were just not there.
He did have perhaps his best year in the IPL. Though 2016 was better in absolute numbers, the way Kohli reinvented himself at this age, against left-arm spin and well-oiled plans, to win the Orange Cap by beating batters a decade younger than him, was simply special. It also took RCB to playoffs from a near-unsalvagable spot, showing how impactful he still can be.
But that was sandwiched between a Test slump worse than the one he had between 2019 and 2022, where he didn’t hit an international century but played some special, disciplined knocks in India, Australia, South Africa and England. In 2024, he managed just one 70 against New Zealand and a century in flat batting conditions in Perth.
Apart from that, his technique gave up on him for most of the T20 World Cup while his cover drives slowed, aggravating his outside-off issues down under. It seemed like the last all-format push he could give his career by the end of 2023 and the start of 2024 just fizzled out, making the man with the most Godly knocks for India look like a vulnerable mortal.
That man was missed, dearly. Not just for his game-changing abilities but also for his energy and off-field influence on the men around him.
His first innings in Melbourne was a sign that his ODI game might still be intact. The next year’s Champions Trophy could be the moment for him to redeem himself in his favorite format. But if he can’t, the end of a great career, unfortunately, might be closer than many imagine.
Jasprit Bumrah: Big Me
After the year he had, Bumrah can be forgiven for listening to Kendrick Lamar on repeat in the dressing room. There was hardly any Big Three, Bumrah was the only Big Me.
In the ongoing Tests against Australia, he reached a peak that even the greatest of the game haven’t scaled, becoming the first bowler in the sport’s history to take 200 Test wickets at an average of under 20. Overall in Tests in 2024, he got 71 wickets at 14.92 with six five-wicket hauls, three against Australia and one each against South Africa and England.
After the England fifer, he went to the top of the ICC Test rankings for men’s bowlers, becoming the first ever to top it for all three formats. But for those who watched his genius in action, how often was he the only one to break the partnerships, the only one to trouble batters, on all kinds of pitches, the rankings still didn’t seem to vindicate his impact.
The batters’s lull was so low that without Bumrah, India would have perhaps lost 2-0 to South Africa and would’ve been 4-0 down to Australia. He had a couple of lulls here and there, especially in the first two Tests against New Zealand where on pitches that didn’t give him anything to work with, he couldn’t supersede nature to save India.
But Bumrah made that up with a Player of the Series performance in the T20 World Cup — again, one man turned the tide in that final when Kohli’s half-century looked set to go to waste — where he took 15 wickets at a still-unbelievable average of 8.26.
Bumrah can retire today and he’ll be an Indian cricket legend. But for the team, it’s just about how they manage their most potent weapon’s fitness with more and more cricket coming up. The biggest goal for Indian men’s cricket should be to build enough support around him so his shoulders don’t give up because of all the carrying he has done and will have to do.
