When Varun foreshadowed impending trouble for NZ

In just his second ODI, Chakravarthy impressed with a five-wicket haul, leading India to a 44-run victory through his bowling performance.

His googly to dismiss Michael Bracewell leg before seemed the luckiest of his five scalps. Replays showed it may have been an attempted leg-spinner not coming back enough; a review would have saved the left-hander. The delivery played out like a googly, which even umpire Michael Gough couldn’t spot. That’s because the ball was bowled with a scrambled seam. Cricket analysts would have taken note. Just as they study every delivery from the release onwards. Many Kiwi batters, even the better players of spin, couldn’t read Chakravarthy off his hand.

Hadn’t Chakravarthy begun to bowl leg-breaks with the conventional seam position? His much-discussed switch to relying on more overspin than sidespin came after batters began lining up against his googly, and his carrom ball became predictable.

Then again, what’s a mystery spinner without leaving people in a quandary. That he can return to his old ways against a certain batter and employ his newest learnings against another is what makes the mystery spinner the most exciting.

It’s his newly acquired ability to impart more revolutions to the leg-break that makes his sucker ball, the googly, even more potent. The googly did the most damage to the Kiwis. Whether it was the googly pitched shorter to get opener Will Young, or the one bowled fuller, flighted over the batter’s eyeline that got Glenn Phillips. Or the unintentional googly to get Bracewell.

“Basically the ball goes inside, outside and goes straight. So, you can keep it that way but there are minute changes that you can do with that also.” That’s all Chakravarthy would say.

“So, you can have certain variations with that. It depends on the batsman and depends on the time of how and when you bowl, as in how the ball is. If it’s very old, you can try certain variations,” he added. The Bracewell dismissal came with a 37 overs old ball.

An over earlier, Phillips had spotted his googly and smacked it over deep square leg boundary off the back foot. The wily bowler was quick to course correct. He bowled fuller, but fairly quick at 93.2 kph. Phillips missed and found himself plumb in front of the stumps.

Chakravarthy 2.0 is showing his bowling mystery isn’t any longer about his carrom balls alone. His leg-spinners are more deceiving, his googly equally confounding the batter. All delivered with subtle variations in speed and use of the crease. And a splash of the cross seamer, the 113 kph quicker one that flummoxed Mitchell Santner.

“He’s become more accurate now from the last time he played for India, way back in 2021,” skipper Rohit Sharma said. “He understands his bowling really well. There is definitely something about his bowling which he’s using to his advantage. Some of our batters also couldn’t figure that out, which is always nice.

“Watching from behind when I was standing in the slips, the variation has become a lot more. And now you see that he’s getting a lot of wickets and getting more often as well, which is a good sign for us as a team.”

It’s T20 cricket that gave Chakravarthy a name. Took him out of formal wear to sport the India blues, from the service industry to the high-octane world of international sport. With instant success in ODI cricket, he’s taken the next leap.

Three years back, the T20 World Cup in Dubai didn’t go to plan, finishing wicketless to be left out of India until last year. Now, he finds himself two wins away from becoming a world beater, possibly with him showing the way.

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