Team India and Chennai Super Kings (CSK) seamer Deepak Chahar has come leaps and bounds as far as his batting is concerned. In the last few months, Chahar won a game single-handedly for India with the bat and almost another one against South Africa last month when the Men in Blue fell agonisingly short of South Africa’s score by 4 runs in the final ODI of the three-match series in Cape Town.
Chahar, who wanted to become an all-rounder from an early age, focussed more on batting only after 2020 when MS Dhoni, his captain at CSK asked him to give some time to that aspect of his game as well.
Speaking to SportsYaari on their Youtube channel, Chahar said, “One day Mahi bhai said to me… ‘you have done a good job with the bowling but haven’t justified your batting. I think you should do that’. He told me the day he announced his retirement. We were sitting in the evening and talking. Dhoni said I should focus more on batting.”
In fact, Chahar mentioned that around 2017-18 he was a better batsman than a bowler and focussed more on his batting side of things. However, on overseas tours, his batting took a backseat and he emerged as the swing bowler, he is known today.
“I have been batting since I was young and this pursuit of being an all-rounder had started back then itself. In 2017-18, I used to bat better because I was at home and so I used to practice batting a lot. In fact, I used to focus more on batting than bowling because there was a limit on the number of balls you would bowl in one day because doing more would take a toll on your body,” he said.
The 29-year old said that when he was with the Rising Pune Supergiants, he was more of a batter than a bowler but in First-class cricket main batters got most of the time to bat and thus, his batting practice came down and his fluency got affected.
“When I went to Pune (Rising Pune Supergiants), I reckon my batting was better than my bowling. But after that, when I started playing more, especially overseas, I didn’t get much chances to perform with the bat. The amount of practice would come down. Whenever I played First-Class, the main batters would get more time. Because of this, the fluency in my batting got affected,” he added.
Now, seen as in a similar vein of Shardul Thakur – a bowling all-rounder, Chahar has seen his stocks rise not just for Team India but at the IPL auction as well. Chahar became the most expensive purchase of CSK at an IPL auction as he rejoined the franchise for INR 14 crore in 2022.
