Shamik Chakrabarty at Eden Gardens
Varun Chakravarthy befuddled England by turning the ball and not turning it. Harry Brook fell prey to the former. Liam Livingstone was done in by a straighter.
It’s an incontrovertible fact that England batsmen don’t play spin well, for the majority of them read the ball off the pitch rather than from the hand. On highways, their gung-ho style yields spectacular results, but this Eden Gardens pitch was a bit on the slower side, as predicted by England’s head coach Brendon McCullum. As the degree of difficulty increased, only Jos Buttler was up to the challenge.
The game changed when Varun was brought into the attack, in the sixth over. Before that, Hardik Pandya was loose with the new ball. India went with only one specialist seamer in Arshdeep Singh, as Mohammed Shami was surprisingly omitted. It felt like a poor call until the spinners started to hold sway. In the end, with the advantage of winning the toss and bowling first on a dewy Eden, an overload of spinners turned out to be a tactical masterstroke.
Varun was at the forefront of this spin-punch. Brook decided to take the attack to him, unleashing a ferocious cut. The spinner’s response was a wrong’un that sneaked through the gate and castled the batter. Brook was fooled by the drift and the turn. Livingstone came and played for the turn, when there was none. A nice drift beat him in the air and the ball fizzed off the surface. Varun was varying his pace nicely. His first spell read: 3-0-16-2.
More than 55,000 fans turned up at Eden on a Wednesday evening. They expected fireworks, with both teams boasting heavy artillery. They, however, saw something they are pretty familiar with — the Kolkata Knight Riders template of choking the opponents in the middle overs. Varun and Sunil Narine do it for KKR. The former had his vice-captain, Axar Patel, to complement him here. Together, they accounted for five wickets and broke the back of England’s batting.
Over the past three-odd months, Varun is a bowler reborn. He returned to the international fold after a three-year hiatus and immediately started to make his presence felt. The 33-year-old played eight T20Is last year and bagged 20 wickets at an average of 11.70. In the first T20I of 2025, he returned with 3/23 from four overs; Buttler being his third scalp.
What changed? By his own admission, a technical tweak did the trick. Side-spin was shunned and over-spin embraced. It took him a couple of years to perfect it and be international-cricket-ready. “I had to go to the drawing board and check out all my videos and what I figured out was that I was bowling side-spin, and it was not working out in the higher level, so I had to change everything about my bowling,” Varun told the host broadcaster during India’s tour of South Africa in November. “It took me two years and I started bowling that in the local leagues, TNPL, Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, Vijay Hazare Trophy and IPL also. It worked out there, so I have started bowling it on the international stage and it’s working out for me.”
As India chased down 133 in 12.5 overs, mobile flashlights were turned on in the stands. The mid-winter Eden looked resplendent. After the lows of the Australia tour, albeit in a different format, smiles returned on the faces of the fans. Varun was the chief architect of the win. Abhishek Sharma put the finishing touches with a 34-ball 79.
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