Chahar, a bit of everything

The disadvantage with cricketers like Deepak Chahar is that they come off looking ordinary to an untrained eye.

He is quick, but he is no Jasprit Bumrah. He swings the ball both ways, but he is no Bhuvneshwar Kumar. He is accurate but he is no Mohammed Shami. He is crafty, but he is no Harshal Patel. He is young, but he is no Arshdeep Singh.

His statistics do not offer much to put a dent in the 'he's ordinary' narrative either.

Chahar has featured in eight One-Day Internationals and picked up 13 wickets and scored 179 runs. He has played in twenty Twenty20 Internationals and contributed with 26 scalps and chipped in with 22 runs when he has gotten a chance to bat (5 innings).

Also, from his white-ball debut in 2018 to now, Chahar has torn his quadriceps and busted his back. Besides that, he has had a hamstring concern and a range of niggles typical of his breed.

Despite these red flags, there is a slim, very slim, chance that he could crawl his way into the side for the T20I World Cup in Australia.

It is quite a stretch given that he fell off the hierarchy in the six or so months he took to recover from his latest injury, but cricketers like Chahar do not go away.

They come back, as Chahar did on Thursday against Zimbabwe, and pick up player-of-the-match honours with figures of 3 for 27 from seven overs.

This is why the 30-year-old with a laundry list of injuries has retained the confidence of the management. Also because a trained eye understands that a team is not about filling all available slots with superstars. It is about finding those who can do a bit of everything well enough to provide the background for the stars to shine.

Chahar is not as good as most of the aforementioned pacers, but he showcases more than a bit of that something each of these bowlers uses as his primary tool. Besides, he has worked on his batting enough to look comfortable under pressure.

In his evolution, Chahar has, inconspicuously, turned into the utilitarian cricketer Indian cricket needs at the moment: nothing extraordinary, but essential.

In the wake of Hardik Pandya's emphatic return to the side, the management could have ended their search for a fast-bowling all-rounder, but even a cursory introspection would have revealed to them that their tail ran too long.

When conditions promoted spin, the team could go to the likes of Ravindra Jadeja and R Ashwin, or even Axar Patel, to spike the score towards the fag end of the innings, or at least delay the end. But when conditions were not favourable for spinners, aka outside the sub-continent, the team's strategy involved one or two spinners and three full-time pacers. And often, those full-time pacers were walking wickets.

This is why Hardik's stocks grew over time, but with him nursing his back, the team went through a list of pacers whose skillsets were not limited to rolling their arms over. This is why the likes of Stuart Binny, Rishi Dhawan, Vijay Shankar, and Shivam Dube were all given a crack.

Decent experiments those, but Hardik's return meant, they would all take the backseat.

Chahar's elevation, courtesy MS Dhoni's consistent faith in him during the Indian Premier League and Indian head coach Rahul Dravid's belief in the CSK players' abilities from his India A coaching days, meant they would all slip out of relevance.

The management had understood by then that the abundance of one-dimensional players was throwing off combinations, and so Chahar became the new solution. Unfortunately, that buffer lasted only so long before his quadricep gave in, and he missed tours to England and the West Indies.

He is back now and looks sprightly, inspired even, but even he wouldn't be foolhardy to predict what comes next.