At the start of 2019, Kuldeep Yadav was on cloud nine. Having picked up a five-for in the Sydney Test, the chinaman bowler was billed as India’s premier spinner by head coach Ravi Shastri. By the end of the year, however, Kuldeep was struggling to keep his place in the team in all three formats.
Back on track
Not just the National team, Kuldeep was even dropped by Kolkata Knight Riders during the Indian Premier League.
However, the bowler seemed to have got his mojo back in his first outing in the new decade, with a strong show against Sri Lanka in Indore on Tuesday.
Speaking on the year that was, here on Thursday, Kuldeep said: “It was a tough one. But, I learned a lot of things and the biggest positive was getting to know that I could have planned things better. If I had given it more thought and given more time to myself, I could have performed better.
“In 2020, I will try to plan every game better and give myself more time, more time to reflect on my game. You play a lot of matches, but at the same time you have to give yourself more time to plan for the next game. I want to be more mentally prepared this year.”
In his endeavour to prepare better for the year ahead culminating in the T20 World Cup and the following Test series in Australia, Kuldeep said he had been “eating the brains” of the performance analyst and coaching staff.
Support staff’s help
“I will definitely take the help of video analysts and speak to the bowling coach in the nets. We need to work on figuring out the opposition batsmen’s strengths and weaknesses,” he said.
Since everyone was aware that he was a chinaman bowler, who has wrong-uns and flippers, he needed to bring changes to his bowling and catch the batsmen by surprise, he said.
