Kuldeep Yadav rues lack of consistent opportunities

Kuldeep Yadav has had a terrible time in the past few months. Once an unputdownable force in the bowling set-up, Kuldeep has found it difficult to even breakthrough into the first XIs of most squads he has been a part of. Then, when he got the opportunity to impress in the ODI series against England, he came up short against a highly aggressive batting line up on pitches not suitable for his style of bowling.

Discussing what went wrong for him in the series against England, Kuldeep, in an interview with Mid-Day newspaper, said that a lack of consistent opportunities hampered him in finding consistency in line and lengths. He said that the focus was on finding a perfect length which he and his coach both felt the way to go forward.

“It would have been better had I focused on length. If you’re playing regularly, you get an idea about the length and can quickly identify what length to bowl. But when you’re playing with breaks, the length may sometimes be a little up or short. If I work hard on my lengths, it will help me bowl better. My sir [Pandey] felt the same,” Kuldeep said in the interview.

Kuldeep Yadav and his spin bowling partner Yuzvendra Chahal came into the picture when India decided to move away from the pair of Ravichandran Ashwin and Ravindra Jadeja, who were considered safe options instead of wicket-taking ones to force the issue in the middle phase of the game.

They tasted success on the tour of South Africa and England before things started to get tougher for both of them, more so for Kuldeep. One school of thought suggests that batsmen have understood the lack of pace in his bowling and hence he has been found out at the big stage. Kuldeep, however, does not heed to those talks, and instead focussing on improving his skills to bring new weapons up his sleeve to fox batsmen.

“I don’t pay attention to all this talk. It’s important that I keep improving my skills and be as accurate as possible. If you’re playing regularly, batsmen tend to read you. If they are getting comfortable playing me, then my job as a bowler is to keep improving. And that’s why I look to add or change a few things every time. With the help of video analysts, batsmen are aware what the bowler is doing…how he is bowling the wrong’un or leg-spin, etc,” Kuldeep added.

He said the game remains the same for all batsmen and bowlers as they are competing against each other every day and hence more than being found out, it’s about factors such as rhythm, confidence that also dictate players’ performance over time.

“Everyone is here to improve. Despite all the analysis, batsmen still find ways to score runs and bowlers still find different methods to take wickets. There are other factors too like form, rhythm and confidence. If confidence is high, you’ll start taking wickets and people will again start talking good things about you,” Kuldeep asserted.

Kuldeep has returned to the Kolkata Knight Riders for the upcoming edition of the IPL and he will have his task cut out to break it into the KKR XI as well after missing out in some games last season.