E-Paper
Axar Patel, the allround ace up India’s sleeve
Axar Patel's spin bowling expertise and adaptability make him a key player for India in white-ball cricket, excelling in pressure situations and diverse matchups.
Kolkata: Axar Patel has been around for more than a decade but you wouldn’t be able to pin down the correct designation for him in white-ball cricket. The moniker of batting allrounder carries more heft and leverage, especially when India plays in Asia or on slower pitches of England or the Caribbean.
Check out his bowling averages in white ball cricket though and it might prompt you to go the other way around. More than a wicket per game and economy rates of 4.49 in ODIs and 7.21 in T20Is, backed up by a career IPL economy of 7.35 say Patel isn’t your typical bits and pieces allrounder—he is the specialist India seek according to the scenarios.
If not for Ravindra Jadeja, Patel probably would have made a mark earlier, a point he had driven home with a stupendous haul of 27 wickets when Jadeja was ruled out of the England Test tour in 2021.
When the pitches are conducive to spin bowling, Patel can be lethal. But when they are flat, he generally relies on his height and variations of speed to deny the batters space and time to cut or pull.
In this Asia Cup, however, Patel has slowed down considerably, aiming to flight the ball more than he usually does. Result? Fifteen dots, 18 runs and the key wickets of Fakhar Zaman and Salman Agha that broke Pakistan’s spine.
He had started in his usual rhythm though, firing the ball at over 90kph to Zaman. The matchup was in Zaman’s favour because ideally the ball would be turning into him, but Patel undid him with an arm ball that produced a miscue.
To squeeze a wicket out of an unfavourable matchup like left-arm spin versus left-arm batting is what makes Patel so tricky to play.
Pakistan coach Mike Hesson, however, felt the pressure they cracked under was more self-made.
“He slides the ball, occasionally turns one. It’s more the accuracy and pressure that they build up, when you build up a lot of dots, sometimes your mind plays tricks and you play big shots,” Hesson said after their seven-wicket loss on Sunday. “It’s certainly not that they can’t pick it, the fact is we struggled to rotate strike to take pressure off ourselves.”
But India captain Suryakumar Yadav said Patel’s success against left-arm batters isn’t one-off. “His plans are very clear. Whenever I see him at practice, he bowls a lot to left-handers because that’s a proper match-up,” he said. “You feel if a left-hander is walking in, you can’t bowl a left-arm spinner, but he practices more to the left-hand batters. And when he bowls to the right-handers, he has his own plans. I’m really happy with his clear plans.”
Patel’s impact wasn’t only in taking those two wickets but also in limiting Pakistan’s runs when they were desperately looking for some momentum. Using his high trajectory was one way, but Patel also embraced the possibility of bowling slower through the air at times. That meant apart from the breakthroughs, Patel also ended up conceding only three runs in his first two overs.
“Every new match has a new wicket, but when we played here during the last match, I felt that with the speed I was bowling, it was getting easy for the batsman, so I assessed that a bit and tried bowling on the slower side,” Patel later said in an interview on bcci.tv.
This is what the experience of more than a decade can count for, especially in an ever evolving format like T20. Add to that Patel’s growing consistency with the bat and it’s not a surprise how Gautam Gambhir—who prefers allrounders to specialists any day in T20—has looked to use him as a floater in that very skilled and deep batting line-up.
“I feel he is a very experienced campaigner,” said Suryakumar. “He has been around the Indian team for a very, very long time. He knows his job really well. His plans are very clear. And I am sure if given an opportunity, with the bat too, he will grab it with both hands.”
It’s not a secret India are aiming to attack with spin in this Asia Cup, primarily through Kuldeep Yadav and Varun Chakravarthy. It’s also most likely the template India would adopt for the T20 World Cup at home next year.
But this puzzle is incomplete without the faith Patel brings to the table. His brief might be to only stop the runs, but by adding subtle varieties, Patel constantly reinvents himself as a wicket-taking option in the middle overs.
In a team trying to strike that perfect balance between bowling superiority and batting solidity, that’s nothing short of a boon.
