Varun Chakravarthy: Late Bloomer Defying Age Expectations

For most international cricketers, 35 is the time people start asking how much is left in the tank. Varun Chakravarthy never got that memo.

He debuted for India at 29, an age when many T20 specialists are already halfway through their careers. Now, after a year that would have broken plenty of younger bodies, he insists he’s only getting started.

“At this stage of my career, I still feel I'm in my first half of my career because I started cricket very late. So I still feel there's a long way to go,” he told TimesofIndia.com in an interaction facilitated by equipment manufacturer ASICS.

It sounds simple. It explains a lot.

A year of extremes

Look at the last 12 months of his life.

A T20 World Cup on home soil, where he finished as India’s joint-highest wicket-taker with 14 wickets. An IPL season played with hairline fractures in his left hand and toe. Then, just when the body had already been stretched to its limits, the first muscle injury of his career – a Grade 2 left hamstring tear during the England T20I series.

Rollercoaster doesn’t quite cover it.

For a bowler built on rhythm and deception, a torn muscle is not just another line on the medical chart. It’s a direct threat to the very mechanics that make him so hard to pick.

“This is actually my first ever muscle injury. So all of my injuries have been impact injuries and other accidents that have happened on field,” he explained.

Impact injuries he understood. A collision, a blow, a freak incident. This was different. This needed unlearning and then relearning his own body.

Rebuilding at Bengaluru

The rehab grind took him to the BCCI Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru, where the work was as mental as it was physical.

“The expertise at CoE helped me and people helped me to gain my confidence. Every person working there helped me,” he said.

The days there were long and repetitive. Running. Strength training. More running. More strength.

“Definitely, I spent a lot of time there and did a lot of running and did a lot of strength training, which helped me.”

The goal wasn’t just to get cleared by the physio. For someone like Chakravarthy, whose variations rely on subtle changes of pace, angle and trajectory, the question is sharper: can he trust his body enough to be expressive again?

“Yeah, it will take some time to gain confidence. But once you gain confidence, you just start becoming more expressive and that's how it is,” he said.

So he refused to treat the lay-off as a void. Instead, it became a lab.

“When you're away, you can start sharpening your skills. You can upskill yourself, which you don't get much time to do when you're playing continuously.”

Now, fully recovered, he walks back into a packed schedule: three T20Is against Afghanistan, a landmark one-off international against Japan, and the Asian Games in Aichi-Nagoya, where defending champions India enter straight into the quarterfinals.

The spinner who starts from the feet

Mystery spin usually conjures images of contorted wrists, disguised grips and hidden release points. Chakravarthy goes lower. He starts with the feet.

His association with ASICS might now be commercial, but the relationship began on his own terms. He had already shifted to their shoes around 2022, long before the formal deal arrived in January 2026.

“For a bowler, shoes are the biggest equipment they can have. Batters, they have many other equipments, but for a bowler, it's the shoes only,” he said.

It’s not a throwaway line. He dissects footwear with the same precision he brings to a new variation.

“As a spinner, your feet start becoming little broader as in it starts changing shape once you pivot because the spinners have to pivot more after landing. So broad shoes in the toe area that is very important,” he added.

Get that wrong, and the pivot suffers. When the pivot suffers, the release changes. When the release changes, the mystery starts to leak.

Add a supportive heel counter and lighter weight, he says, and you have the essentials of a spinner’s toolkit.

It’s the mind of the former architect at work: analytical, process-driven, always hunting for marginal gains. The ball is only the end product. The real craft begins much earlier, in the unseen details.

A different kind of dream in Japan

If the World Cup was about a billion eyes and home expectations, the Asian Games offer something entirely different: anonymity in a crowd of athletes, and a village full of stories.

The cricket itself is historic enough. A one-off international against Japan, unfamiliar conditions at Korogi Sports Park, and a format that leaves no room for slow starts.

But what excites Chakravarthy runs beyond the boundary.

“It's my first time in Japan. I've never been to Japan and any games also. So all I've played is ICC tournaments and ACC tournaments,” he said, the excitement clear.

The idea of a multi-sport village grips him.

“I'm very much looking forward to meeting other athletes also from other different sports and all those things.

"I want to see how a 100-metre athlete prepares himself, how a badminton professional prepares himself or herself,” he went on to state.

In India’s suffocatingly busy cricket calendar, such cross-pollination almost never happens. Here, a spinner who once drew building plans wants to study sprinters’ warm-ups and badminton routines, searching for something he can adapt, something he can steal.

On the field, too, the theme is adaptability. The pitches at Korogi Sports Park are expected to behave differently from the surfaces he knows in India. Pre-packaged plans will only go so far; reading conditions on the fly will matter more.

For Chakravarthy, that’s not a threat. It’s an invitation.

He has already bent time once in his career, turning a late start into an international breakthrough. Now, at 35, with a World Cup, fractures, a first muscle tear and a return ticket to elite cricket all crammed into a single year, he insists he’s still in his “first half”.

If this is only the beginning, what does the second half look like?