LONDON: There may be very little strikingly different with what he does, but there is something about how he does it. Yuzvendra Chahal hardly looks flustered on the field.
Even in the face of adversity when batsmen go after him, the leg-spinner looks cool. Taking the stick in stride when it comes, he calmly goes back to the top of his run-up, thinking of the next move.
This, Chahal says, has come from chess. Although it has been many years since he stopped playing it competitively, there are elements from the game that he tries to bring into his cricket.
If patience is one aspect of his cricket which has benefited from chess, calculation is another. Both of these are necessary in the game of 64 squares, which he uses when operating between the 22 yards.
“It has been almost 16 years that I stopped playing chess. But yes, there are elements from chess which are useful in cricket. Patience is one of them. Being a spinner, one needs a lot of that when working on a plan and waiting for it to work.
"Then there is the aspect of calculating. You have to think what the batsman is going to do and how you are going to handle that. Like when to use variations like the googly and flipper, where to bowl. If you become predictable, chances of getting hit are higher. So you have to think and try to pre-empt,” he says.
These traits were on display during India’s first match of the World Cup on Tuesday. Trying to force the pace against Chahal, the South Africans lost four wickets.
After the early good work by the faster bowlers, the damage done by the Haryana spinner turned out to be crucial in the end as India restricted Du Plessis & Co to a below-par total. There is little doubt that Virat Kohli will be counting the leg-spinner as one of the aces up his sleeve in the course of the next few weeks.
“It’s difficult to understand from outside how closely Chahal follows the game. He is always thinking about how things are happening and what can be done. He knows everything about what the batsmen are doing and is constantly thinking about what he can do.
"That way, he is someone who is always ahead of the game. There are small details that only he can see. It shows in the way he bowls and the way he goes about his job,” the skipper had said after the opening win.
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One of the very few of teams in the 2015 World Cup without a leg-spinner in the squad, India is among the rare few now which relies on two wrist spinners.
Before the first match of this edition of the competition, Kohli even went to the extent of saying that they have been the most significant additions to his arsenal in the last two years. He can thank the game of chess for playing a small but significant part in this.