India's Varun Chakaravarthy (Image: IANS) NEW DELHI: For a cricketer who made his international debut at 29, Varun Chakravarthy measures time differently. Now, at 35, he has just lived through a rollercoaster year: a T20 World Cup title on home soil where he finished as India's joint-highest wicket-taker with 14 wickets, an IPL campaign played through hairline fractures in his left hand and toe, and then the first muscle injury of his career that forced him into weeks of rehabilitation.
Yet, ask him where he stands in his journey, and his answer is strikingly uncomplicated." At this stage of my career, I still feel I'm in my first half of my career because I started cricket very late.
It is an outlook that perhaps explains Chakravarthy's unconventional rise better than any statistic. The Tamil Nadu spinner has never been one for grand declarations or five-year plans.
In a sport as volatile as T20 cricket, he prefers chasing the next small improvement rather than the next milestone. Now fully recovered from the Grade 2 left hamstring injury he suffered during the England T20I series, Chakravarthy returns just in time for a busy stretch: three T20Is against Afghanistan, a historic one-off international against Japan, and the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, where defending champions India begin directly from the quarterfinals.
Learning a new kind of injuryUntil this summer, pain had always arrived the same way for Chakravarthy, through collisions, impact or bad luck. A torn muscle was unfamiliar territory."
This is actually my first ever muscle injury. So all of my injuries have been impact injuries and other accidents that have happened on field.
The expertise at CoE helped me and people helped me to gain my confidence. Every person working there helped me," he explained.
Recovery meant long days at the BCCI Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru, where rebuilding confidence became as important as rebuilding strength. The rehabilitation, too, was relentless."
Definitely, I spent a lot of time there and did a lot of running and did a lot of strength training, which helped me." For a bowler whose craft depends on rhythm as much as deception, returning isn't simply about being medically fit.
It's about trusting the body enough to express the imagination that makes him so difficult to read." Yeah, it will take some time to gain confidence.
