Curious case of a leggie and red-ball cricket!
There is no doubting the fact that Yuzvendra Chahal is a gifted legspinner. He has the guile, the flight, the leg spin, the variations, and the chess player’s brains to bring it all together and outwit the batsman. In short, he should be the ideal bowler to add to India’s already talented bowling mix and provide competition to R Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja in the Test team. And yet, he is not even spoken of as a contender whenever the team selection debate takes off.
So what does the future hold for Chahal?
Ashwin and Jadeja’s succession planning is crucial. Kuldeep Yadav and Chahal should ideally be the future duo that India depend. With a crucial Test series coming up Down Under, this future is perhaps closer than it has ever been.
Australian wickets are hard and bouncy and other than Nathan Lyon, most home grown tweakers from Clarrie Grimmett to Shane Warne who have done well there, have been wrist spinners. It is worth recalling that among Indian spinners, Bhagwat Chandrasekhar took 28 wickets in his only full series in Australia and Anil Kumble picked up 44 wickets in his last two sorties Down Under.
With two high class wrist spinners in Chahal and Kuldeep, India would do well to depend less on the finger spin of Jadeja and Ashwin this Australian summer and use the opportunity that the tour provides to lay the foundations for the future of Indian spin, a future that rests on the wrists of two very talented young men.
So what exactly is going on here?
Chahal made his ODI debut in June 2016 and in the two years since, he has played 25 matches picking up 45 wickets at 22.96 apiece. His partner-in-crime Kuldeep Yadav earned his call
up a year later and has played 29 matches picking up 58 wickets at 20.10.
In 26 T20Is over the past two years, Chahal has bagged 42 wickets at 18.98 apiece. Kuldeep, in a bit more than a year, has picked up 24 wickets at a cost of 13.2 runs each.
Together, they have formed a wrist-spin duo that few whiteball teams can boast of. Kuldeep has graduated to Test cricket, but Chahal is not a contender in an environment where many of the current Indian Test players have come up through the whiteball cricket route and achieved success with the red-ball.
One standard response is that Chahal doesn’t play first-class cricket and has not proven that he can bowl long spells.
Chahal made his first-class debut for Haryana in 2009. He was 19 and had given up a career in chess — he continues to be the only FIDE rated player to play international cricket — to concentrate on cricket. Yet, in the nine years since, he has played only 29 first-class matches picking up 74 wickets.
While it is true that the Haryana of recent years are far removed from the days of Kapil Dev and rarely make it to the knockout stage, it does not fully explain how little red ball cricket Chahal has played in the last two years.
What makes it even more quixotic is that in the season that he played for Haryana in 2016-17 he picked up 33 wickets at 22.60 runs apiece.
The 285 overs that he bowled in 12 innings in that Ranji season included instances when he bowled between 34-39 overs in an innings. He was thus, from all angles, doing exactly what is expected from a frontline spinner in red-ball cricket, and doing it with stunning success. And yet, that was the last season Chahal appeared in whites for Haryana.
As Chahal graduated into the Indian ODI and T20I team in 2016, he did so at the expense of his state-mate Amit Mishra, seven years Chahal’s senior. With Virat Kohli reposing faith in Chahal and Kuldeep as the future of Indian spin in the limited overs after he took over the ODI captaincy in early 2017, Mishra fell out of reckoning despite a sterling ODI performance against New Zealand.
Back in Haryana, in the following first-class season, it was Mishra who took over as captain. With the change in leadership, Chahal found himself out of contention in Haryana. As long as Mishra continues to captain Haryana and Chahal is unwilling to move to another state, the standoff is bound to continue.