T20 World Cup: How Axar Patel and Kuldeep Yadav, with Ravindra Jadeja's silent contribution, justified Rohit Sharma's vision

Rohit Sharma’s look spoke louder than the words that followed. “Why not four spinners?” That meant, to the question, “Why four spinners?” He then explained, “I don’t want to go into details about it. I definitely wanted four spinners. There are technicalities involved in it. I’m not going to reveal them now,” he said at the press conference before boarding the flight to New York.

In hindsight, it was obvious. The Caribbean islands are a familiar shore for Sharma and Co, and they knew the courts would get lower, slower and spin as the tournament progressed. Four weeks and a few weeks later, the decision turned out to be a masterstroke, the difference between India and the rest in several matches. If the Indian pace trio had won most of the bouquets in the group matches, the spin trio had spread their wings and batted in the final matches of the Super Eight and the semi-final.

They make a strange trio. They are exclusively left-handed. Axar Patel and Ravindra Jadeja advocate a semi-orthodox art, although they are different in their templates, release points, rhythm modulation, preferred lengths, variations and thought processes. Kuldeep Yadav is a special case, who confuses with his wrist mysteries. In the broad spectrum of left-arm spinners, there are three different worlds. It would have been tempting to swap one of them (maybe Jadeja or Patel) with leg-spinner Yuzvendra Chahal. But Sharma and the team management resisted the temptation to revert to that type of spinner.

India's Kuldeep Yadav is congratulated by his teammates after taking the wicket of Australia's Glenn Maxwell during an ICC Men's T20 World Cup cricket match at the Darren Sammy National Cricket Stadium in Gros Islet, St. LUCIA, India’s Kuldeep Yadav is congratulated by his teammates after taking the wicket of Australia’s Glenn Maxwell during an ICC Men’s World Cup T20 cricket match at the Darren Sammy National Cricket Stadium in Gros Islet, St Lucia. (AP | PTI)

Use spinners wisely

But the main thing is how intelligently Sharma used them, knowing when, where and how to use them. Yadav is the designated wrecking ball, given the freedom to be expansive, even a little bold. It takes the nature of the surface out of the equation and often has the freedom to choose its extremities, depending on which side the side wind is blowing, in order to maximize the drift it produces. It’s an unspoken pact that he can’t freely charge batsmen with pressure release balls. The pitches are often aggressive and he has rewarded Sharma’s faith with flawless consistency (10 wickets at 9:40; economy rate of 5.40). The precision and discipline combined with drifting and diving (even if he didn’t fly the ball as extravagantly as before) stunned the batsmen. Glenn Maxwell had nightmares about the evil that consumed him in St. Lucia. On the flattest of pitches he was the deadliest of spinners. Sharma calls him one of his two “gun shooters.” The other being Patel.

The left-arm spinner is his man for all seasons. He could juggle multiple roles; bowl in the powerplay as he did against England, strangle batsmen in the middle overs, switch between striking and supporting bowlers. Of all his spinners, Patel hits the stumps the most, is the most intelligent in using the crease and varying the release points. So, in the fourth over of the match against England, Sharma threw the ball to him. Jos Buttler had just slammed Arshdeep Singh for three fours, but Patel took a ball to extinguish England’s biggest scintilla in the chase.

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India's Axar Patel bowls a ball during the ICC Men's T20 Cricket World Cup second semi-final between England and India at the Guyana National Stadium in Providence, Guyana. India’s Axar Patel fields a delivery during the second semifinal cricket match of the ICC Men’s T20 World Cup between England and India at the Guyana National Stadium in Providence, Guyana. (AP | PTI)

The ball was no spectacle. Patel bowled a flat ball from wide of the crease, as if anticipating a reverse sweep. He did just that, only the ball dipped and came in at a much slower pace than Buttler had anticipated. That it was over rather than high shows how early the England batsman has got into the short yardage. There was no magic or wonder in the ball, but an irresistible accuracy, a shocking simplicity, a battle cry that you don’t need a bag of variations to gather wickets. He dismissed Jonny Bairstow with another simple, off-spin ball that crashed into the stumps. That’s how Patel steals his wickets. In plain sight, a daylight robbery, when you know what he could and couldn’t do, but let him take the wicket. When batsmen expect his deliveries to skid, he slows them down, and when they expect him to slow his pace, they end up getting beaten by his skid, not so much zip.

Jadeja’s cameo role

The pair’s combination reduced Ravindra Jadeja to a cameo role. He is no longer the prince of parsimony he once was, a dimension he has traded in on the journey to scaling the heights of the Test match. But he offers assurance, guidance and composure under pressure, in addition to his usefulness at the bat.

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The fact that Sharma could afford to have Jadeja and Patel in the XI was partly due to their batting skills. Suddenly the team boasted a splendid balance: three spinners, two of whom could smash boundaries, three seamers, one of whom could bowl a powerful shot. Four bowl with their left arm, two with their right arm. Give Sharma any kind of track, he has the ammunition to blow away the opponents. New York were seamer-friendly, so he unleashed their seamers; St Lucia were a front-front, so they exploited the best of their pitch-transcending bowlers, Bumrah and Yadav; Guyana were spinner-friendly, so they pushed Patel forward. It was a classic case of a skilled bowling firm ably led by a skilled captain. Now he has answered the spinner question eloquently.