The ground will be familiar. So will the pressure. On Thursday, Varun Chakaravarthy returns to Chepauk — his home, his people, his pitch — for what is effectively a knockout game for India at the T20 World Cup. The must-win fixture against Zimbabwe comes on the back of a chastening defeat to South Africa, where the Proteas appeared to hand the world a blueprint for dismantling him. And that exposed something uncomfortable: despite the presence of Jasprit Bumrah, India are heavily reliant on Varun in the middle overs. When he has an off day, there is simply no reliable Plan B.
The scrutiny, then, is intense. But those who know him best will tell you: he has been here before.
It was soon after Varun landed in Chennai following the 2021 T20 World Cup — a tournament India failed to get past the group stages of, one where he had paid the heaviest price. The mystery wasn’t working, and he was the first casualty. Threats flooded his social media. His place in Indian cricket felt suddenly, terrifyingly uncertain. And it was in that moment, in that city, that he called his mentor AC Pratheepan and dropped a line that would change his career.
“Anna, I’m gonna let go of my stock delivery and move from side spin to over spin.”
“The 2021 World Cup was his first big tournament aside from the IPL. There was a lot of expectation on him, which wasn’t fulfilled. He was left out after just one game, and the threats online were intense,” Pratheepan recalls. “In those circumstances, he walked up to me and said he wanted to change everything that made him. He had got there because of his stock delivery — the carrom ball. To let go of that isn’t easy. But he chose to be brave at his lowest point. You need b***s to do that.”
Moving to over spin opened new dimensions. The ball now hits the top half of the bat more consistently, denying batsmen the sweet spot, and the extra bounce has made him significantly harder to read. “I remember him telling me, ‘Anna, if I get this ball sorted, I’ll be the best bowler,’” Pratheepan says. “And he has just walked the talk.”
Their conversations these days have a different quality. “Initially, it would take a lot of time for us to agree on whether something would work. Now that time has reduced dramatically — we understand the limitations clearly. We mostly talk about the mental side and making sure he is at peace,” Pratheepan says.
The bowling reinvention, though, was only half the story. Despite taking wickets consistently in the IPL, the India call-up kept being delayed by fitness concerns. After a standout IPL in 2024 still didn’t bring the national recall, his friend Akkil Srinaath offered a blunt assessment when they met during the Tamil Nadu Premier League.
“Without sugar-coating, I told him, ‘Machi, your fitness is your weakness.’ He had everything else, but fitness was the only reason he wasn’t in the Indian team. He didn’t even have a personal coach for his training. That got him thinking,” Akkil says. “After TNPL, we started working together with one clear target: the 2026 T20 World Cup.”
A rigorous 16-month programme followed. The first two months were dedicated entirely to running, before nutrition was addressed and weight-loss work began in earnest. Varun has since shed around 10 kilograms. The transformation in his fielding has been equally striking — from a player the team management had to carefully hide in certain positions, he became someone who asked captain Suryakumar Yadav if he could patrol the long-on boundary.
“I don’t blame him for not having that fitness awareness earlier — he wasn’t a cricketer who came through the system. He was an architect. To suddenly be in the Indian team, doing yo-yo tests, standing next to Virat Kohli and Hardik Pandya — that’s probably the most intimidating thing he faced,” Akkil says. “His bowling got him up the ladder from TNPL to IPL to India. But to succeed at this level, fitness was non-negotiable.”
Through all of it, the man himself has remained unchanged. When he is with Pratheepan, a good chunk of their time goes into discussing the movie scripts Varun has been writing. Some days, he still puts on his architect’s hat and adds colour to a house or two.
And when he needed a batsman to practice a new delivery recently, he didn’t call a professional. He called someone from his local cricket days.
“He told me, ‘if this fellow struggles to pick me, then nobody can,’” Pratheepan says. “That tells me he is the same Varun I met years ago.”
On Thursday, with India’s World Cup hopes on the line and a home crowd willing him on, that Varun — the one who scrapped everything and started again — is exactly who they’ll need.
