“My little nephew Ted, he is four years old. We were playing backyard cricket the other day. He came in with Bumrah’s action and the nightmare continued,” Marsh joked at the Cricket Australia awards. Marsh was dismissed by Bumrah once in the third Test in Adelaide and in both innings of the fourth Test in Melbourne. His performance in the latter was the tipping point as the selectors dropped him for Beau Webster in the fifth Test.

Marsh joked that he felt a “lot of love” before the start of the Border-Gavaskar Trophy but not so much after that. “Prior to December I felt a lot of love. Post December, bit of a different story. All jokes aside, over the last few years I have felt a lot of love from the Australian fans,” he said. Marsh managed only 73 runs in four Tests with a best of 47. The fact that he was hardly able to bowl throughout the series led to increasingly rampant questions on his spot, which he ultimately lost to Webster.

Bumrah’s incredible tour of Australia

Marsh is only the latest in a lengthy list of Australian players who singled out Bumrah as the biggest challenge they had to deal with during the series. He took 32 wickets across five Tests, averaging 13.06 with a remarkable strike rate of 28.3. His wickets tally is the joint highest for an India fast bowler in a Test series, and the highest for any India bowler in an away series.

India were heavily reliant on Bumrah to provide the goods, with the rest of the bowling attack often looking several leagues behind the 31-year-old. He bowled 151.2 overs, which accounted for 24.4% of all balls bowled by India’s bowlers, while his wickets tally represented 40% of the total.