"Better Skilled Bowler At Present Than Bhuvneshwar Kumar": Ex-India Star On Deepak Chahar

It has been a decade but Bhuvneshwar Kumar's debut in what was the last bilateral series between India and Pakistan, seems like yesterday. The very second delivery of his international career swung away and after pitching viciously tailed in to disturb opener Nasir Jamshed's timber. Bhuvneshwar has not bowled such a delivery in the last two years. Now that he is expected to lead the Indian attack at the T20 World Cup, his own performance at the death overs is under the scanner.

There were some good spells but against good teams, that magic or 'X-factor' has been distinctly missing.

He has, since that wicket-taking delivery, played 78 T20Is and a career economy rate of 7.02 appears more than decent but what has proved to be the Meerut man's undoing is handling the responsibility during the death overs.

Since 2021, Bhuvneshwar has played 23 T20I games for India and has got only 15 wickets from them.

But that's not the biggest worry. The biggest factor is the 159 deliveries he has bowled at the death (between overs 17 to 20th) and the 266 runs that he has conceded at an economy rate of 10.03.

He has conceded 23 extras but more importantly has been smashed for 20 fours and 12 sixes in those 23 innings.

These are the numbers which are far from satisfactory. In fact, scary, because Bhuvneshwar will be the leader of a rag-tag Indian attack at the T20 World Cup with the team management still unsure how Mohammed Shami would shape up.

Harbhajan Singh, a member of the 2007 T20 World Cup team feels, that on current form and skill-sets, Deepak Chahar should be picked ahead of Bhuvneshwar.

He reckons that having both of them in the same squad will make the attack look a bit uni-dimensional.

Harbhajan in fact did an analysis of each of