Now uploading, Kuldeep 2.0
CHENNAI : Ask Kuldeep Yadav what he remembers of September, October and November of 2019. He would tell you the countless number of deliveries he sent down with red ball, white ball and even pink. He would turn up for each training session, quickly finish his warm-up and get down to business. He would do this day in and day out. So much so that him bowling to a single stump without any batsman became a common sight.
What he didn’t get to do in this period was bowl in any match. His routines were rigorous. Kuldeep was the most common face even in optional training sessions. After each delivery, he would check with bowling coach Bharathi Arun and head coach Ravi Shastri if the ball was coming out right. This wasn’t a phase one expected Kuldeep to be in in the first place. Only at the beginning of 2019, Shastri had made bold claims that the chinaman would be the first choice overseas.
But as India played South Africa and Bangladesh at home, despite being in the squad, he was hardly in the mix. The think tank had found something missing in his armoury. The last edition of IPL wasn’t too kind on him, with batsmen finding no difficulties in picking him out of the hand. It came to a point when he was dropped mid-way through the season. The World Cup came and went by, but the Kuldeep of circa 2017-18 was missing.
“It (2019) was a tough phase. I learned a lot of things and the biggest positive was getting to know that I could have planned things better. If I thought more and gave more time to myself, I could have performed better. In 2020, I will try to plan every game better and give myself more time to plan for the next game. I want to be more mentally prepared this year,” Kuldeep said in Pune on Thursday.
It was then that India found the need to improve Kuldeep’s variations. Being the practitioner of a unique method, he had variations: the one that comes back into the right-hander, one that holds its line and one that spins away. Add the drift that leaves batsmen flummoxed, he had everything. But there was something else he had to develop. “Now everyone knows how Kuldeep bowls. He is a chinaman, who has wrong-uns, flippers. I’ve to bring changes in my bowling, which the batsman cannot figure out,” he said.
The variations that Kuldeep mentions here isn’t a doosra or teesra. What he is talking about is arm-speed and loading — as in how he approached the crease. Loading is what Arun often stresses on. If that falls in place, the rest will follow. In 2015, it worked with Ashwin. Four years later, it was Kuldeep who needed to sort this out. He bowled a lot in the nets. His loading and arm-speed started to come in a sync and Kuldeep found his mojo back in the series against West Indies.
Despite good outing against West Indies in December, Kuldeep knows 2020 isn’t 2018 where the Indian team was willing to risk runs for the sake of wickets by playing two wrist-spinners. In T20Is, there is no room for both. They have gone back to finger spinners Jadeja and Washington Sundar. Not just because they are handy with the bat, they can be restrictive with their lines too. Competition getting intense, the coming months will tell if Kuldeep has changed enough to win back his place.