Jasprit Bumrah v Travis Head - the most exciting player battle right now

Australia were 373 runs away from the target when Travis Head got out in the fourth innings at Perth. Yet, Jasprit Bumrah and Virat Kohli celebrated the wicket passionately. And they had good reason to—it was a terrific delivery. But it was also Head’s wicket. It means more these days.

Across all formats, Bumrah and Head are two of the best male cricketers on the planet. Head’s scoring rate is like an unstoppable force, and that’s meeting an immovable object—Bumrah’s pinpoint accuracy. 

At the moment, it feels like Head and Bumrah need to do everything for their teams. The final two Tests of this series feel like a heavyweight contest between these two. So far, Bumrah has been taking body blows from the Australian. Now, it is simple for him and India. They need to aim for the head. 

Both Head and Bumrah debuted in international cricket in 2016, and made their Test debuts in 2018. The Indian pacer quickly established himself as one of India’s best seamers in Tests, forming a trio with Ishant Sharma and Mohammed Shami. 

The first time they went up against each other in Test cricket was in the 2018/19 Border Gavaskar Trophy. Head scored 33 runs off 103 deliveries and was dismissed once. The wicket came at the MCG, where Bumrah bowled a terrific inswinger that crashed into the stumps. 

That would be one of his 21 wickets in the series—the joint-highest with Nathan Lyon.

Head was Australia’s second-highest run-getter in the series, but he still averaged less than 35.

After that series, their next face-off would be in the Melbourne Test of 2020. Head again got out to Bumrah in the first innings, and scored 17 runs off 23 balls against his bowling across both innings. He was dropped from the playing eleven after that match, and he only returned in the Ashes next year. It is worth noting that Head was also the co vice-captain in early 2019. 

Nobody has ever taken more Test wickets than Bumrah at a lower average. When he passed Sydney Barnes' 189 wickets, he became the statistically best bowler we've had with such a long career. If you add Barnes back in, he’s still only second. Barnes delivered both seam and spin. And Bumrah can also set up a batter like a spinner. He also has a great cutter, almost like an offspinner. But he is different from Barnes; he is not a spinner but a fast bowler who can use spin or pace skills to be good, regardless of the conditions.

In the current series, Bumrah has already picked up 21 wickets at 10.9 runs apiece.

Travis Head is not of that pedigree. In his career, he has been in and out of the Australian team in all formats. Coming into this series, he hadn’t been in great form in Tests. But in the last three years, he has been the best all-format batter in the world. More importantly, he is one of the quickest scorers in the world in every format. In Test cricket specifically, his scoring rate has gone up by over 30 points. Batters don’t usually do that. 

Head is the highest run-scorer in the series by a distance. Nobody else has 250, while he’s sitting at 409. KL Rahul is second, and he’s had a spectacular series on the down-low. But Rahul has faced more balls than Head, for nowhere near the amount of runs. Obviously, batting at five is much easier. But Rahul has also not faced Bumrah. Head is still second on this list. The Aussie number five is scoring runs at a rapid pace while staying in for a long time.

Almost no other Australian batter averages more than 20 against Bumrah in this series, and Cummins is the only other batter to have a strike rate of over 50. Travis Head averages 42, while striking at 92. This is an extraordinary performance against a bowler who is at the peak of his extraordinary powers. Plus, it’s in bowler-friendly conditions, and when the rest of the top order has not been among the runs. 

If you can crack the Bumrah code, performing well against the rest of the Indian bowlers is not as big of a challenge when you’re Travball. Siraj has dismissed him twice, and Rana once. He strikes at 110 and 143 against them, respectively. He hasn’t gotten out to the other bowlers, while clocking a strike rate of over 60 against all. Ashwin was supposed to trouble him, though he would have been dismissed if Siraj didn't drop the catch. He still scored at a strike rate of 70 against Ashwin. 

We talked about the dismissal in the second innings at Perth when he was at 89 off 101, chasing an improbable fourth-innings target. In that knock, he scored 15 runs off 26 balls against Bumrah.

In the following games, we saw what he could do against the best bowler on the planet.

Head’s first century of the series came in the pink ball Test at his home ground. The left-hander scored 140 off 141 balls in the ten-wicket win. Bumrah bowled the first five balls that he faced, and he hit a cover drive for four. But that was the end of the fast bowler’s spell in the first session of day two. By the time he came back into the attack after dinner, Head was well set at 53 off 70. In this four over spell, the Australian scored a run a ball 11 off him, including two fours. After the second new ball was taken, he hit another couple of boundaries against Bumrah in the very first over.

Enroute his quick-fire 152 at the Gabba, he scored 33 runs off just 34 balls against the leader of India’s attack. It is important to remember he came in when the score was only 75/3, but in 33.2 overs. He smashed four boundaries and scored a higher percentage of his runs on the leg side. In the end, Bumrah did end up getting a nick behind to dismiss him. But even in the second innings, when Australia were 18/3, the in-form batter hit a four through midwicket and another behind point in the four balls of Bumrah that he faced. 

But with them, it isn’t just about Test cricket. They were the two players who were dominant in each of the three white-ball tournaments—World Cup, IPL and the T20 World Cup—from October 2023 to June 2024.

If you look at them by format, you see that Head is scoring off Bumrah at a good clip in each one. It is over 60 in Tests, more than 140 in T20s, and almost as high in ODIs. 

When you factor in Bumrah’s career record, you can see that Head is not just faster in every format, but way quicker than anyone else. He can score off Bumrah, whether it is a white, red or pink ball coming at him in a way others can’t. The Test numbers here look like he doesn’t dominate him much, but he is still 36% quicker in Tests. 

In ODIs, he is 76% faster than the rest of cricket combined (though it is from a relatively small sample size of 29 balls).