Curious case of a leggie and red-ball cricket!
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.