This Sunday, at the 2026 T20 World Cup, Pakistan will face a different Varun, a master mystery spinner who claims to never tire of working on new variations.Pakistan should know how dangerous Varun is. It was after India beat Pakistan in the Asia Cup 2025 final that he became the top-ranked T20I bowler for the first time. He has remained there ever since.Googly, legbreak with sidespin, legbreak with overspin, carrom ball, and seam-up make up an incomplete list of Varun’s variations. While dissecting the art of the top six T20 bowlers and the challenges they pose as part of his Decoding series during IPL 2025, Ambati Rayudu said no batter could read Varun when he was a net bowler at Chennai Super Kings in his early years. “He was a mystery, and remains a mystery,” Rayudu summed up.
Since then, Varun has only become more challenging to face in both T20s and ODIs, a format he has only occasionally played but with devastating impact – he played a key role in India’s Champions Trophy win last year. And his growth as a bowler has coincided with a paring down of mystery. While he has nearly discarded the carrom ball, he now imparts more overspin on his wrong’uns and legbreaks. He has also begun running in quicker to put more body into his delivery, allowing him to impart more revolutions and generate greater dip, forcing numerous batters to fumble with their judgment of length, leaving them unsure whether to play him off the front foot or back foot.
Since the 2024 T20 World Cup, Varun has more T20I wickets than any other Full-Member bowler (61) and his strike rate of 11.1 is the second-best of any Full-Member bowler to have bowled at least 300 deliveries, a whisker behind Brad Evans’ 11.0. Even as batters have increasingly looked to play him defensively, Varun has found ways to keep getting them out.
The googly, which he releases with an arm beyond the perpendicular and delivers using his second and third fingers, is Varun’s main weapon. Of his 61 wickets since the 2024 World Cup, 48 are off the googly (nearly 79%). And the wrong’un has also kept batters quiet, as an economy rate of 6.5 against one of 9.8 for the legbreak suggests. The googly’s effectiveness is also evident in the fact that Varun’s strike rate for the legbreak in this period (roughly 20) is twice that of the googly (10).
Varun’s biggest impact has come in the middle overs. In all T20 games since the start of 2024, he has taken 81 wickets in overs 7 to 16 with an economy rate of 7.55 and an average of 15.48. With a cut-off of 40 wickets in this phase, his strike rate of 12.30 is the lowest of all bowlers (where ball-by-ball data is available).
All this success has done nothing to slow Varun down in his quest to keep improving himself.
“He’s actually working on a few new deliveries, which you’ll sort of see rolled out in various stages,” said India assistant coach Ryan ten Doeschate, who has previously worked with Varun at Kolkata Knight Riders. “Not that he needs to, but that’s the level of professionalism you can expect from Varun. He’s always trying to be better.
“We’re always analyzing the areas he bowls, the areas he needs to bowl on surfaces and be to specific players. He’s a great thinker around the game. He’s just someone who likes to spend time working on his craft.”
After picking up 3 for 7 in two overs against Namibia, Varun acknowledged that he was working on new variations, but said he would only unveil them in a match if he felt “courageous” enough in the moment.
If anyone knows the meaning of that word, it’s him. This is a bowler with one of the most unusual, and colourful life stories in cricket. Architect, interior designer, aspiring guitarist, assistant director in films – the list of the things he did before he became a professional cricketer is as long as the list of deliveries in his arsenal. In an interview on his former Tamil Nadu and India team-mate R Ashwin’s YouTube channel, Varun said he has never been shy about exploring things that inspire him.
Varun’s continuing success has meant Kuldeep Yadav, a more experienced wristspinner, and a bowler who would walk into most international XIs in the world, is struggling to find a regular spot in India’s T20I team. While Kuldeep’s art of left-arm wristspin is uncommon, Varun is quicker, harder to hit, and in his current rhythm almost impossible to read. Having missed out on the T20 World Cup in 2024, Varun will want to make headlines in this one, on February 15 and beyond, pushing the boundaries as he goes.
