Analysed: How can England solve the Varun Chakravarthy mystery?

Varun has taken 27 wickets in 10 matches – including a record-breaking 12 scalps in the four-match series in South Africa– ever since he was recalled to the T20I setup last October. He’s a leg-spinner by name, but is probably more part of the growing band of ‘mystery’ spinners now going around in the game’s shortest format.

At any rate, he is a mystery to England’s batters. In the first three T20Is of this five-match series, he’s taken 10 wickets for 87 runs, in 12 overs. Six of these wickets have been bowled.

Harry Brook claimed the smog made it difficult to pick Varun in Kolkata, and the spinner, almost in response, dismissed him in identical fashion in Chennai. (Brook's claim wasn’t wrong, rather ill-advised and ill-timed.) But there is a larger issue at play than just the smog. England have had trouble reading Varun – and indeed, India’s other spinners.

This isn’t unique to them, though. In India’s previous T20I series against South Africa and Bangladesh, batters were repeatedly attempting to play him off the wicket, since they couldn’t read him from the hand.

It’s not for a lack of trying. But opposition batters need to know what they're looking for.

Why is it hard to pick Varun Chakravarthy?

Against traditional leg-spinners, batters are taught to identify the googly – the ball that pitches and spins back into the right-hander, rather than leaving them like the stock ball does.

The tell-tale sign of a googly is the bowler’s hand. Since the googly is delivered out of the back of the hand, as opposed to the side with a normal leg break, batters know if they see the back of the bowler’s palm facing them, they can set up to play the ball turning the other way.

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But of course, Varun isn’t a traditional leg-spinner. This method doesn’t work against him for one simple reason – he delivers both the leg break and the googly from the side of the hand. So a batter who thinks the back of the hand is what they need to look out for, is left none the wiser against him.

It doesn't help the batters' case that Varun doesn't treat the googly as a variation from a stock ball. Traditionally, the majority of leg spinners spin the ball away from the right-hander, with the one coming back in just an occasional variation.

But across the last three IPL seasons, where data is available, Varun bowled the leg-break 57 per cent of the time to right-handers, and 49 per cent of the time to left-handers – meaning the googly isn't just a deviation from a pattern, but accounts for a significant portion of his deliveries.

Varun Chakravarthy – Proportion of leg-breaks bowled in the last three IPL seasons

Vital cues: How batters can try to read Varun

If a batter is trying to read Varun from the hand, there is one potential cue from their perspective. When he bowls the googly, his middle finger sticks out a touch – compared to the leg-break where it's right on the ball and plays a role in spinning it.

But this is something that, realistically, is only visible on slow-motion replays. Expecting a batter to spot this from 22 yards away, from Varun's quick-arm action, is quite far-fetched.

Rather, batters can use a cue that they're used to looking out for – the direction of the seam.

When facing Varun, they might be better served by not observing his hand and fingers, but focusing on the ball, waiting for the milliseconds after it comes out of his hand.

The googly is almost delivered like a cross-seamer, constantly being scrambled as the ball rotates in the air. Contrast that to the leg-break, where the seam is presented quite prominently, facing towards slip for the right-handed batter. This way, the side of the ball is almost always cleanly visible to the batter.

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Now, this is also easy to see in slow motion, and is much simpler to talk about than execute. Crucially though, it has the advantage of being a more familiar task for batters.

When facing up to pace bowlers, most batters are attempting to pick up the seam orientation, so they know whether the ball will swing away or back in to them. It's a similar exercise here – and at a slightly slower speed than against a pacer.

If Varun is figured out, can he adapt?

It's a big if, and even if he is, it's unlikely to happen quickly. There's also one advantage he may have over other spinners.

Very often, when batters are unable to pick a bowler from the hand, and realise that playing them off the wicket is extremely risky, they can default to employing the sweep and reverse sweep – cross-batted shots which can help 'smother' the ball, whichever way it spins from the pitching point.

But key to Varun's renaissance in the past couple of years has been the component of overspin, something he has touched upon before. After the first T20I against Bangladesh in October last year, he'd said, "I used to be a side-spin bowler, but right now, I have completely shifted to being an over-spin bowler.

"It's a minute technical aspect of spin bowling, but it took me more than two years. I gradually tested it in TNPL and IPL. While the mental aspect also had to be worked on, the major chunk of effort I put in was on my technical side."

How is over-spin different to side-spin?

Over-spin is when a bowler adds extra revolutions to the ball down the front of it – towards the batter. This is opposed to side-spin, where they give it a 'rip' towards the left or right.

The effects of over-spin are twofold – one, the ball can dip on the batter, i.e. fall quicker and therefore pitch shorter than they expect. Two, once the ball bounces, it bounce more than a similar delivery bowled without overspin. The latter is especially visible if you watch Varun closely – observe that even when batters defend fullish deliveries, the ball often hits the sticker of the bat rather than the middle.

Both of these can help a spinner combat the cross-batted shots. Either batters can misjudge the length, or the ball can bounce higher than they expect, causing a mis-timed shot. It's not easy to develop, though.

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Varun has worked on it since late 2021, and the shifts are visible in the ball-tracking data.

In the following charts, a higher trendline says this – for a given speed of the ball in its downward motion (i.e. when the bowler delivers), it travels faster when moving upwards (i.e. after bouncing).

If two different balls move downwards at the same speed, but one travels upwards faster after bouncing, it means there must be another factor affecting it. This could be the nature of the pitch, or something extra the bowler has done to the ball.

The former could have a larger impact in one-off cases, but over a larger sample of deliveries, this is most likely down to an action of the bowler – in this case that's likely to be the over-spin.

It took Varun the best part of three IPL seasons to consistently land his leg-break on the spinner's 'defensive' good length of 5-6m, with a significant component of over-spin. It's quite possible this is what he was working on when he said in April 2022 that he was "working on a new leg-spin variation".

His experimentation is visible when looking at the 4-5m length, a slightly fuller, 'attacking' good length for the spinner which can induce front-foot offensive shots from batters. His leg-breaks with more over-spin were landing more in this area across 2022 and 2023, before he was able to nail landing them in the 5-6m range in 2024.

Combined with this development, Varun has also gradually perfected landing his googly with more over-spin in the 4-5m range, opening up the avenue for him to target the stumps and exploit potential bat-pad gaps against right-handers.

Since the end of IPL 2024, 12 of his 27 international wickets (44.4 per cent) have been bowled or lbw. In all T20 cricket, including the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy, this goes up to 47.2 per cent (17 out of 36).

So, is it all hopeless against Varun?

It can feel like that, once you see that even after picking which way the ball is turning, Varun has more than enough other tools to trouble batters. Even if you read him, it's no guarantee of success.

But it's the first thing a batter needs to do, and England in particular have struggled with it in this series. Clarity of thought, at least in this part of the process, should help free up batters' minds to focus on the rest; picking the length, deciding which area of the field to target, and so on.

As for the bowler himself, you can bet your life that Varun will be innovating constantly. After all, it's what has gotten him this far in the first place. Even in the third T20I of this series, he began using another variation. On seven occasions, he bowled a seam-up quicker delivery which didn't spin at all, clocking around 108-110 kmph – another potential arrow in his quiver.

With an English victory in Rajkot, the five-match series remains alive. Can they solve the Varun mystery to come back, or will he just keep bamboozling them?

Video credit: Hotstar

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