Birthday special: Yuzvendra Chahal – India’s cheerful white-ball specialist
Indian leg-spinner Yuzvendra Chahal is celebrating his 31st birthday today. He is currently among the best spinners in limited-overs cricket. Here, we will be discussing his journey to becoming one of the top spinners in international cricket.
Early Life
Yuzvendra Chahal was born on 23 July 1990 in Jind, Haryana in a middle-class family. His father KK Chahal is a lawyer by profession and his mother is a housewife. He is the youngest in the family and has 2 elder sisters who live in Australia.
He completed his studies at DAV Public School, Jind itself. He did not feel like studying at all but he used to like cricket and chess very much. That is why he started playing chess only at the age of 7 and also started playing cricket as well.
Chess champion
Due to his passion and hard work, he started defeating the Chess Master of his own town. Soon, he got a chance to show his talent in chess at the national level at the age of just 10. He won the title of champion by winning the national level children’s chess competition in 2002.
Due to this title, for the first time, he got an opportunity to play for India at the International level in the Junior World Chess Championship held in Greece. Apart from this, Yuzvendra has also been a part of the Under-16 National Chess Championship.
Changing the path to Cricket
The worst phase of his Chess career came in 2006 as he stopped getting sponsors for the game. The financial constraints kept growing, and that is when he decided not to play chess further and focussed on cricket.
The IPL gig
IPL brought a great opportunity and turn in Chahal’s life. He was first bought by Mumbai Indians in the 2011 IPL. Chahal did not get much opportunity to play in the 2011 IPL, appearing in only one match in the entire IPL. Later, he got a chance to play all the matches for his team in Champions League T-20.
Chahal took 2 wickets for 9 runs in 3 overs in the final of this league. And the result was that in the 2014 IPL auction, Royal Challengers Bangalore bought him for Rs 10 lakh. He did very well for RCB in the IPL.
International debut
For the first time in 2016, he got a chance to play for the Indian cricket team against Zimbabwe. He impressed everyone with his performance taking a total of 9 wickets from three ODIs and three T20Is. Later, in the same year in IPL, he took 21 wickets and became the second-highest wicket-taker after Bhuvneshwar Kumar.
He was chosen for the three-match T20I series against England in 2017. In the third match, Chahal picked up 6 wickets for 25 runs, which is still the best bowling performance by an Indian spinner in T20Is. He never looked back after this performance and has been rising continuously in his career.
