Chess champion Chahal plots to stay one move ahead of batsmen
Leg-spinner says strategic thinking he learnt on the board still serves him well, reports Tim Wigmore
The old aphorism has it that cricket is a game of chess on grass. That gives Yuzvendra Chahal, India’s leg-spinner, an advantage.
Bespectacled, studious and undemonstrative, Chahal still looks more like the junior chess champion he was in his youth than the eighthranked one-day international bowler in the world. But he has taken 10 wickets in five games so far in this World Cup, providing an essential source of wickets and mystery for Virat Kohli in the middle overs.
Watching the way he teases out batsmen, it is tempting to draw a link with the sagacity and chicanery deployed by the best chess players.
Chahal was a national under-12 chess champion, represented India in the World Youth Chess Championship aged 16 and continues to play for fun alongside his cricket career. Chahal believes that these experiences shape his cricket. “Chess helps me in plotting
the opposition batsman’s dismissal. I try to be one step ahead of the batsman,” he has said. “When the batsman is going hard, I try to remain calm. My chess training helps me in staying focused on the job in hand.”
Though Chahal was from a middleclass family in Jind, a lack of funds led him to give up chess. “To progress in chess, he needed about Rs. 5 lakh (£5,700) a year. But we could not find sponsors. So, he had to abandon the game,” his father later explained.
These barriers did not apply to Chahal in cricket. His rise from Jind, a town with no tradition of producing leading players, is a small emblem of how more opportunities have opened up for Indian players away from the traditional centres of Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai and Bangalore.
This process began long before the Indian Premier League, but that competition accelerated it. In 2011, when he was 20, Chahal was recruited by Mumbai Indians. He did not play, but was selected for the Champions League, and took two for nine from three overs in their victory over Royal Challengers Bangalore in the final. That was a game that helped shape Chahal’s career: while he played only one IPL match for Mumbai, he became a regular for Bangalore after joining them in 2014. He has taken 100 wickets for Bangalore in 83 matches, a record for the franchise.
Bangalore, of course, are the best team for a prospective Indian player to excel for; there is no better way to earn Kohli’s trust. In 2016, Chahal was selected for India for the first time, albeit in a series in Zimbabwe used to experiment. His maiden cap came in ODI cricket, which illustrated how India used the IPL as a tool to identify ODI players too; when Chahal was selected, he had taken just 25 wickets in 50-over cricket at domestic level and had only played sporadically in first-class cricket.
But the IPL had imbued Chahal with adaptability and experience of bowling to the world’s best batsmen. After ravaging England’s middle order with six for 25 during a T20 in Bangalore at the start of 2017, Chahal’s skills have transferred readily to ODI cricket, at home and aboard. Indeed, his record away – 44 wickets at 20.97 apiece – is even better than at home.
Chahal’s style is distinctive. Of all the leg-spinners to bowl in ODI cricket since 2015, only Adil Rashid has a slower average speed. While some spinners can resort to bowling faster and flatter under pressure, Chahal uses his flight as a weapon. Though he has a useful googly, he uses this sparingly, bowling just three on average in a 10-over spell.
Much of what makes Chahal such a threat in the middle overs lies in his mind. He can increase his pace without any discernible change in his action, and varies his line astutely, preventing batsmen from being able to sweep him at will. One delivery he has honed, oddly enough, is the full ball down the leg side with less flight. He has found it is hard to hit for a boundary and offers a reliable way to give away a single and get the batsman