Still in the past but not lost to it: Kuldeep Yadav chronicles

Bengaluru: About a year ago, sitting alongside host Gaurav Kapoor and team-mate Yuzvendra Chahal on the Breakfast with Champions show, Kuldeep Yadav showed them an image of himself from 2014. 

It’s not one any professional athlete would be proud of Kuldeep wasn’t either. But his response to what he has eaten since then to lose weight summarises his experience. 

Although the question was more dietary, Kuldeep said, “Dhoke-dhakke sab khaya hun (I have eaten betrayals and failures).”

The line elicits laughter from the two others on the set, perhaps as intended by Kuldeep, but you could tell there was a tinge of sadness behind the joke.  

The left-arm wrist spinner has been a part of the Indian set-up since 2017 and has still only played 12 Tests, 103 ODIs and 35 T20Is. While much of his playing time was curtailed because of surgery to his knee, the ebbing and flowing of his confidence dictated his presence or lack thereof. 

Kuldeep, by admission, was very confident of his craft when he entered the professional space, so much so that he was too rigid to listen to those around him. 

In a span of around two years, he went from being one of India’s lead spinners, the supposed one-man wrecking crew for India abroad, to become the fifth option after R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja, Axar Patel and Washington Sundar. That was humbling. 

Not long-ago Kuldeep claimed that M S Dhoni’s exit didn’t help the matter because he didn’t have that someone to guide him. But once he found favour with Rohit Sharma, he could express himself better. 

This trait of Kuldeep is evident even in the Indian Premier League because he still hasn’t, and rightly so, let go of how no one in the Kolkata Knight Riders’ camp was helping him gain confidence. They instead kept insisting he increase pace without telling him how to. 

“Sab kehte rahe speed badhao, but kaise karna hai wo kisi ne nahi bola (Everyone said,I need to increase my speed but no one told me how),” Kuldeep has said earlier this year.

“I was scared to try new things. Before my injury, I had been bowling with the same action for 15 years. There were lots of questions in my mind.”

Those questions led to him requesting the counsel of childhood coach Kapil Pandey.

Once they had identified all the things which were expected of him from coaches and the support staff, the duo went to the drawing board and came up with a plan.

Although this involved him having to stress his knees a bit more than he was supposed to at the time, he was finally able to recreate his action and tick all the boxes.

Now, as India embark on a long journey to the Americas for the T20 World Cup, Kuldeep has become the lead spinner. It’s not a role he thought he would assume again, his brain has the tendency to spiral still, and yet here he is. 

A bit wiser, a bit more understanding of the ways of the world, and a bit of that chip on the shoulder is blunted. Kuldeep is at ease, and it shows in the way he’s going about this edition of the IPL. 

Having found comfort in Rishabh Pant’s captaincy, Kuldeep has picked up 14 wickets from nine games at an average of 20.20, an economy of 8.20 and a strike rate of 15. These are not objectively great numbers but given how the season is playing out for bowlers in general, these are not bad at all.

Moreover, his attitude has been uplifting. “I feel bowlers should be a bit braver. Instead of sticking to their own plans, they are more worried about the strength of batsmen. Look at Jasprit Bumrah. The other day, Ashutosh Sharma scooped his yorker for a six, but has he stopped bowling the yorker? No, he is sticking to his strengths and that’s why he is doing so well,” said Kuldeep when asked if the Impact Player rule was making it harder for bowlers. 

In fact, that was evident on Tuesday night when Pant brought him on in the 18th over when Rajasthan Royals needed 41 runs from 18 balls. Kuldeep picked up two wickets and conceded four runs to turn the tide.  

See, Kuldeep still spends a little too much time talking about how he was betrayed and how the world hasn’t been kind to him, but at least he isn’t using them as excuses anymore. Perhaps that’s his version of wisdom. 

Whatever might be the case, he’s in a much better state of mind. And that is often the only difference between a bowler who bowls to restrict and one who bowls to dismiss.