Kuldeep, Jadeja, Axar and Varun don’t so much spin a web as represent a 4D threat to India’s opponents
Andrew Fidel Fernando09-Mar-20251:31
Kumble: ‘Kuldeep doesn’t look for the surface to help him’
There is no relent. With two you could maybe manage. With three it was already a minefield (ask Bangladesh, or Pakistan). Four? Hah! On this worn square? Yah, good luck.Eke out your little singles here, squeeze out an edged four there, you can hit out and maybe nail one to the boundary, but you know you’ve taken a risk, and how long are you really going to be that brave for? And anyway, there are bowling changes that can be rung, new fields that can be employed, a whole new set of problems for you to solve next over.Two of India’s spinners have stock balls that turn away from the right-hand batter. Two of them are difficult to pick. Two of them can bowl in the powerplay. Two are effective at the death. In each of those four considerations, a different combination is represented.Related
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Try to graphically represent the cricketing skills of Ravindra Jadeja (turns ball away from right-hand batter), Axar Patel (can bowl in powerplay/turns the ball away from right-hand batter), Kuldeep Yadav (difficult to pick/effective at the death), and Varun Chakravarthy (difficult to pick/can bowl in powerplay/effective at the death), try to chart their synergies, permutations, and versatility, and what you end up with is less Venn diagram, more three-dimensional quadruple-helix. Like intertwined DNA strands as imagined by a surrealist (MC Escher more than Picasso).It’s often said of spinners that they string up batting orders in their webs. This is like a web, intersecting with another web, layered on to two more webs.Against New Zealand, Jadeja, the most conventional of India’s spinners, delivered the most conventional overs, almost by rote – a factory worker on a production line. He punched in at the start of the 19th, bowled nine unchanged through the middle period, trapped a batter sweeping, rushed through his deliveries to get India’s over rate up, fired in some rocket throws from the outfield in between that New Zealand’s batters dared not take on, and finished with figures of 1 for 30. In the break room of this factory, beneath rows of framed photographs of Jadeja, the little metal straps read “Employee of the Month”. It was he who hit the winning runs, his presence all the way down at No. 8 empowering the batters above him to play more aggressively right through the tournament.ESPNcricinfo LtdBut others had laid the groundwork for Jadeja’s middle-overs shift. Kuldeep, a bamboozler at the top of the innings, a pragmatist at the tail, had ripped a googly first ball to end Rachin Ravindra’s little rampage. Next over, he beat Kane Williamson in the air, which few spinners can ever claim to have done, and took a simple return catch – the ball also perhaps having stopped on the pitch. In his first seven balls, Kuldeep had removed New Zealand’s semi-final centurions. There is arguably no more definitive phase of the match than this.That India have barely missed Jasprit Bumrah in this tournament at the death is also partly down to Kuldeep. In this match, he bowled four overs between the 39th and 47th of the innings. Those cost him only 15 runs – one boundary conceded across 24 balls.Varun was once an aspiring architect, but now in his own telling, bowls one delivery that “goes left” one that “goes right” and another that “goes straight”. The difficulty for a batter is figuring out which is which. Like a Bangalore tech start-up that has devised a hugely profitable algorithm, Varun guards his USP hawkishly, Rohit Sharma stating at the start of this tournament that he rarely ever bowls his variations to the India batters in the nets (there’s an IPL to think about). In this match, Rohit used him in bursts, three overs in the powerplay, four overs in the middle, three overs in the late middle/early death.A legbreak in the powerplay got Will Young, but the crucial strike was against Glenn Phillips in the 38th over, when Phillips was threatening to give serious energy to New Zealand’s final burst. That googly was 92kph. Phillips rolled the dice on which direction it would turn, and picked wrong. It turned in to him, and took out his stumps.Varun Chakravarthy kept New Zealand guessing with his variations•Associated PressAxar, long-legged, wingspan of an albatross, has sniped around the edges of the other three this tournament, picking up five wickets. Crucially, he has also presented the challenge of extra bounce to batters, given his high release point. He and Jadeja were the co-squeezers, his economy rate of 3.62 in the final substantially better even than his tournament economy rate of 4.35 on a track which, in the first innings, took only mild turn. For Axar alone of the quartet, bowling is increasingly secondary. Against New Zealand, India’s only worthy opposition, he produced a 42 in the group match, and an important 29 off 40 in the final.No portion of India’s campaign has wriggled with as much life as Varun’s nine wickets, from just three matches. Of India’s 47 total Champions Trophy wickets, 26 have belonged to their spinners. In the final, they took five of the seven to go down, and had a combined economy rate of 3.79 across their 38 overs. Their total effect has been extraordinary.There is an obvious comparison to make here, to that legendary 1960s and 1970s quartet of Bishan Bedi, Erapalli Prasanna, BS Chandrasekar and S Venkataraghavan. As with most legends, some of the history is imagined – those four spinners only played a single Test together.These four now have three entries on the ODI ledger, and have written their names across a major tournament, imbuing India’s knockouts performances with dynamism, high skill, consistency, and barely relenting control. Virat Kohli may have led chases, Shreyas Iyer might have brought heft to the middle order, and Rohit’s scintillating start was vital in the title match. But if you’re looking for India’s Champions Trophy engine room, it is their two left-arm spinners, their left-arm wristspinner, and their mystery bowler. Cricket has never seen anything like them.