It is difficult for a third spinner to find a place in a team which has brilliant spinners such as Kuldeep Yadav and Sunil Narine. But despite the presence of these bowling stalwarts, Varun Chakravarthy established his identity in the team, obviously by virtue of his brilliant bowling display.
Before this IPL, nobody knew Varun Chakravarthy. Kolkata Knight Riders’ “mystery spinner” delivered a magical bowling spell against a strong team like Delhi Capitals picking up the maiden five-wicket haul of his IPL career at the Sheikh Zayed Stadium, Abu Dhabi on Saturday. He finally finished with figures of 5 for 20 from his four-over spell.
He made his presence felt in the IPL by virtue of superb and skilful bowling performance. He has bagged 12 wickets at an average of 7.05 in ten matches. He has emerged as KKR’s mystery spinner. The reason behind this is that he is equipped with many bowling skills. He uses one skill or the other after discussing it with his coach.
Though Varun is a leg-spinner, he delivers googly, flipper and top spins as per the need. Bowling wicket to wicket is his specialty. The year 2018 was a turning point for his career. In this year only, Varun got 22 wickets in nine matches of Vijay Hazare Trophy. It is in this year that he got an opportunity to play in Tamil Nadu Premier League.
In the Tamil Nadu Premier League 2018, he spun Madurai Panthers to their maiden title. During this stint, Varun got a chance to bowl to Chennai Super Kings and KKR players. As a result of this, Kings XI Punjab bought him for a whopping Rs 8.4 crore, while his base price was Rs 20 lakh.
In the first match for Kings, this bowler turned out to be very expensive giving away 25 runs. This was the most runs conceded in an over by any debutant in IPL. After this, he was ruled out. But next year, KKR included this player in the team at a price of Rs 4 crore in the IPL auction.
He is such a player who started playing cricket at the age of 13 years and in the initial four years, he was a wicketkeeper-batsman. After he failed to get desired success, Varun left cricket and decided to be an architect. But during this phase, he kept his passion for cricket alive by playing tennis ball cricket. And that was when he got associated with a club and started focussing on spin bowling. This is where the story of Varun developing into a spinner begins.
In the current IPL series, Varun has not only been seen containing batsmen but also creating immense pressure on them. He dismissed Delhi Capitals’ Shreyas Iyer, Rishabh Pant, Shimron Hetmyer, Marcus Stoinis and Axar Patel. In a way, Chakravarthy ran through Delhi’s middle-order batting of Delhi Capitals. Playing on behalf of Tamil Nadu, he has made his presence felt in all forms of cricket. Let’s hope his bowling variations will be there to enjoy in future as well.