In Varun Chakaravarthy, Ravi Bishnoi and Axar Patel, India find a new spin template in T20s | Cricket News

Two leg-spinners with vastly different styles and methods and a half-orthodox, half-modern left-arm spinner make a curious trifecta. But in them — Varun Chakaravarthy, Ravi Bishnoi and Axar Patel — India have unearthed a highly multidimensional bowling firm that could make the halo around defending T20 champions burn brighter.Since the triumph in Barbados, India have torn apart the old template and embraced a more dynamic and ambition brand of cricket. The openers tee off from the start, the powerplay overs have become a fountain of boundaries, the middle-order sustains the tempo and the late-order marauders turn on the afterburners. The bowlers are relentlessly attacking, always on the front-foot, hunting for wickets rather than content with dot balls, the fielders uninhibitedly fling their bodies around, and exude vitality even in the gloomiest of situations.
Into this framework have strode in three spinners of unusual craft and wits — between them, they bowled 12 overs for 67 runs and nabbed five wickets to strangulate England in the middle overs. How they went about the business was a fascinating watch, instructive of how the game has evolved too.
First strode in Chakaravarthy, who for much of his career had bowled with the mystery tag around his neck. He can bowl all sorts — the brisk leg-break that skids off the surface, over-spun ones that rears up, the carrom ball that arrowed him to fame, the wrong one, seam-up leg-cutter and the slider. Every batsman might have pored through thousands of his frames and presumed they would have configured his variations.
India’s Varun Chakravarthy, left, celebrates with captain Suryakumar Yadav after the dismissal of England’s Liam Livingstone, right, during the first T20 cricket match between India and England at Eden Gardens in Kolkata, India, Wednesday, Jan. 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Bikas Das)
But batmen still find him a difficult neuter, as though he keeps adding a layer of mystery with every game. He doesn’t, but he keeps refining, with a tweak here, and a tinker there. He keeps changing his release points, uses the breadth and depth of the crease, uses his body cleverly to disguise the speed of his bowling arm. But more than any bodily contortions, the essence of his success is his precision. He is always at the stumps, neither too wide outside the off-stump, not too much on the middle-stump. He plugs away in the off-and-middle pole line. Length-wise, he would rather err on the fuller side than stray short.
He imprisons batsmen in a gilded, cage of suffocation. They hesitate to step out, because the high-arm release conveys an impression (or an illusion) that he is going to bowl flat. He doesn’t offer the ball much air, but he still flights the ball when he wants to. He is not a flat-ball-trajectory bully.
The consequence is batsmen looking to play from the crease, hesitant to step out. They presume their quick hands could bail them out of trouble. But then his balls drift and dip, leaving batsmen brain-scrambled. Harry Brook is considered a fine young batsman of spin bowling. But Chakaravarthy left him clueless, reduced him to batsman heaving blindly and eventually foxed him with a devilish googly that deceived him in the drift, dip and the turn. He had laid the charm offensive earlier, a shortish ball that Brook back-cut. It was slower than his previous deliveries. He served another fiendish googly to rip through the defence of Liam Livingstone. He returned to gobble up Jos Buttler, with an over-spun ball that skidded and bounced more than what England’s best batsman of the night had measured.
Getting used to Chakaravarthy makes getting acquainted with Bishnoi different. He skids diagonally into the crease, swirls his shoulders like a Sufi dancer, but his arm-speed is devastatingly fast, and the ball spits off the surface. He is shorter than Chakaravarthy, and quicker and flatter. He has an evil slider, that if a batsman misses, he is caught dead in front. He mixes it with a spiteful wrong one.
But like his fellow leg-spinner, he has added more skin of cunning into his repertoire. Like a leg-break that he employs more frequently these days, sometimes even more than his slider and wrong one. He wouldn’t purchase swaggering turn, because he releases the ball from behind his head, rather than beside it like orthodox leg-spinners would.
His biggest deception is his mastery of length. He stringently lands the ball in the good-length area or thereabouts. The batsmen are left confused, whether to go forward or back. The length makes him difficult to sweep or slog too. He didn’t purchase any wicket, but made England’s batsmen look inept and indecisive.
To the mix of two leg-spinners sliding and slithering the ball into the right-hander, comes Patel. He too, in this format especially, turns the ball in. But the optics are different. Of all the spinners, he is the smartest exponent of using the crease and varying the releasing points. His arm, when he bowls from the edge of the crease, seems to come from a different post code. Sometimes, he bowls round-arm; sometimes he sticks to a higher point of release. Some balls turn, some don’t; some hold the line, some slip in. He can bowl at the death, in the powerplay or the middle overs.
Whether the return of Kuldeep Yadav would split the trio has to be seen, the odd pair of three make a fascinating watch. As it was on Wednesday at the Eden Gardens, a highly effective one too.

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