The spinner’s personal coach AC Prathiban and KKR spin-bowling coach Carl Crowe reveal the secrets behind Varun’s renaissance
Deivarayan Muthu18-Feb-20251:33
Manjrekar: Varun Chakravarthy should stick to what he does in T20 cricket
When it emerged that Varun Chakravarthy, till then uncapped in ODIs, was persuading India to include him in their Champions Trophy squad, Rohit Sharma explained that he had made his case because he had “certainly shown something different”.What is the difference that’s turned Varun, in the matter of months, from international reject to Champions Trophy wildcard? What kind of spinner is he anyway?Related
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Varun burst onto the T20 scene in 2018 as a mystery spinner with the carrom ball and googly among his seven variations. Four years later, when he was benched by Kolkata Knight Riders (KKR), it felt like his mystery was fading away. His carrom ball wasn’t turning as sharply as it used to, and when he experimented with slowing his pace down, batters were getting more time to adjust to his variations and put him away.So, after IPL 2022, Varun reinvented himself with some help from his personal coach AC Prathiban, the former Tamil Nadu offspinner. With pitches in the IPL becoming flatter and less abrasive, especially at Eden Gardens, his home ground, Varun realised that the carrom ball wasn’t working. While his googly was still hard to pick – he bowls it from the side of the hand unlike conventional wristspinners who bowl it from the back of the hand – he understood that he needed a potent away-going delivery to weaponise it.Varun’s repertoire included the legbreak, but he usually bowled this with a scrambled seam and wasn’t getting it to turn as much as he wanted. He remedied this, and began bowling his legbreaks with a more traditional seam position, and made a well-documented switch from a largely sidespin release to one with more overspin.This change began to make a massive difference to Varun’s output. In his first four IPL seasons, he had managed only six wickets off 270 legbreaks, according to ESPNcricinfo’s logs. In the 2024 season alone, he picked up seven wickets off 129 legbreaks, and took another 11 wickets with a near-identical count of googlies (134).”When Varun came on, he bowled quite a few carrom balls, but after a point it didn’t deviate away [from the right-hand batter] much,” Prathiban tells ESPNcricinfo. “So we worked on the legspin, and to make the googly – which is his best ball – lethal, we wanted to perfect the away-going legbreak.”Varun found the ideal speed of his run-up and we wanted to generate more force from the body and convert it into revs on the ball. If you bowl anything from the shoulders, you will add speed to it, but revs would be lesser. So we were looking to generate the force from the [lower] body [too] and with that he was able to get the revs and the dip. Creating that dip at his [high] speed is his biggest strength now.”Varun Chakravarthy’s bowling evolution has contributed to his becoming India’s second-oldest ODI debutant•BCCISince making these tweaks to his bowling, Varun has been the top wicket-taker across the last two IPL seasons and the top wicket-taker among spinners across the last two seasons of the 50-over Vijay Hazare Trophy.Like his senior R Ashwin, Varun spends hours watching old footage to analyse batters and find ways to stay a step ahead of them. Liam Livingstone’s first-ball duck in the Kolkata T20I last month – he backed away and missed a wrong’un – might have had something to do with this sort of preparation, and Varun’s memory of the previous time he had gone head-to-head with Livingstone at the same venue during IPL 2023.”In 2023, Livingstone was out lbw to a legbreak, playing for the googly,” Prathiban recalls. “He was opened up and was out lbw in that game. I think he was playing for the legbreak and aiming to hit over extra-cover this time, but Varun bowled the googly. That’s where Varun has become tactically aware, and the control over both his legbreak and googly has come with a hell a lot of volume and target bowling.”Varun watches videos of a lot of spinners on YouTube, and he’s even trained at grounds at 2am to figure out his own way of bowling the googly from the side of his hand. He gets into the details of things: arm path, arm speed, release point and everything. That’s what he means when he says: ‘I stick to my process’.”A few months ago, Varun had messaged KKR spin-bowling coach Carl Crowe, asking for footage of his own bowling from 2018, when he was a net bowler with KKR, to assess how far he’s come. Crowe also alludes to Varun out-thinking batters during IPL 2024, but refuses to reveal his plans.”That [asking for footage from 2018], for me, is Varun all over: constantly looking to improve and further add to his skillset,” Crowe tells ESPNcricinfo. “I’m not going to tell you who, but there were two-three batters during the IPL last year that we sat and talked about a lot and some plans that we worked up, and he ended up taking the wickets. At the moment, he might use those plans against those batters [in the Champions Trophy], so I’m not going to share that, but one of the great things about Varun is that he never sits with his skill level and he’s constantly looking to push himself.”Skills like the ball deviating are things you see in front of the TV, but his tactical ability behind the scenes keeps getting better and better. Sunil [Narine] is also pretty good at that and he’s close with Varun as well.”‘The definition of mystery for me is deception, and batters still can’t pick which way his ball turns’ – Carl Crowe on Varun•BCCIHaving recently watched Varun dominate England’s Bazballers in conditions that weren’t especially conducive to spin, Crowe puts Varun in the same league as Narine and Rashid Khan in T20 cricket.”I believe he [Varun] is now up there with the likes of Sunil and Rashid,” Crowe says. “Against England, I think he was taking wickets at nine apiece. England have got some unbelievable players at the moment, but you can see nervousness when they’re playing Varun and they’re not picking him so well. If one of the top white-ball teams is struggling against Varun, he comes into the category of one of the best.”While Varun has moved away from the carrom ball and moved to far more orthodox wristspinner methods, Crowe still considers him a mystery spinner because he still turns the ball both ways without an easily discernible change in action.”The definition of mystery for me is deception, and batters still can’t pick which way his ball turns,” Crowe says. “Back when I was growing up, you would read about how to grip the ball and how to release the ball and stuff, but for Varun, it’s individual to him. I still think he’s mystery.”Gautam Gambhir, the current India head coach and former team mentor at KKR, believes Varun’s mystery could be an X-factor in the Champions Trophy in Dubai. Varun carried similar expectations into his previous ICC tournament, the 2021 T20 World Cup, which was also played in the UAE, and didn’t quite manage to fullfil them. Prathiban backs his charge to right the wrongs this time.”When we had a conversation about ODI cricket and Dubai, I told him that he now has a chance to rewrite what he’s done in the past,” Prathiban says. “You will get that chance only if you’re honest to yourself and your (quest). Nowadays, ODI cricket seems like an extended version of T20 cricket, where Varun has to bowl an extra six overs as an individual with batters coming at him. His approach may be altered but his intent [of being a wicket-taker] will be similar to T20s.”Having faced multiple rejections as a fast bowler and keeper-batter when he was young, Varun went to great lengths to reinvent himself as an unconventional spinner at 27. At 31, he had the courage to transform himself once again. That courage, perhaps, stems from his wide range of life experiences. Besides making a cameo appearance in a cricket-based Tamil movie, he has had stints as an architect, interior designer, scriptwriter and coach in academies in Tamil Nadu.Prathiban believes these experiences will continue to hold him in good stead.”Varun has gone through a lot in his journey, so I feel he can adapt to any situation not just in cricket but also life. You put him on an island alone, and he will find a way to survive. If you put him in a desert, he will manage to survive. If you put him in a high-tech city, he knows what to do.”
