Axar Patel's 27 Wickets: the 2021 England Test Series

Between 13 February and 6 March 2021, Axar Patel bowled in three Test matches and took twenty-seven wickets. He was twenty-seven years old, had been playing professional cricket for a decade, and until that February had never been picked in a Test XI. It is one of the largest returns anyone has produced in their first three matches in the format, and it happened in a series that India had to win to reach a world final.

Seven years of being the other left-armer

The delay is the first thing to explain. Axar Patel had made his one-day debut for India in 2014 and played regularly in white-ball cricket for the next three years without ever being close to the Test side. The reason was not mysterious. India already had a left-arm orthodox spinner who batted, and he was Ravindra Jadeja.

Two players with the same handedness, the same discipline and broadly the same skill set do not usually coexist in a Test XI, and Jadeja's record made the choice straightforward. Patel spent those years in a queue of one, alongside Ravichandran Ashwin at the other end of the bowling attack and Kuldeep Yadav and Washington Sundar competing for whatever third spinner's place existed. When his chance arrived in 2021 it arrived because Jadeja had been injured on the tour of Australia and was unavailable.

He was named in the squad for the first Test at Chennai but did not play. England won that match by 227 runs on a surface that behaved unusually well for four days, and the series went to Chepauk again a week later with India one down and the 2019-2021 World Test Championship final at stake.

Chennai, second Test

He took two wickets in England's first innings and five in the second, on a pitch that turned from the opening session. India won by 317 runs. The most instructive part of the performance was not the haul but the manner of it: a large proportion of the dismissals were bowled or leg before, and very few came from balls that turned a long way.

That became the pattern for the whole series and it is central to understanding the bowler. Patel bowls quicker through the air than most finger spinners, on a flat trajectory, and his stock delivery does not turn much. What it does is skid on with the arm and hold its line. On a surface where the ball is gripping, a batter defending against a left-arm spinner plays for turn as a default. A ball that goes straight at pace hits the pad or the stumps.

Two days at Motera

The third Test, at the newly rebuilt Narendra Modi Stadium in Ahmedabad, was a day-night match with a pink ball and it lasted less than five sessions. England were bowled out for 112 and 81. India made 145 and then knocked off the target for the loss of no wickets. Patel took 6 for 38 and 5 for 32.

Eleven wickets in a Test that finished inside two days is a peculiar statistic to hold, because the match is remembered mostly as an argument about the pitch. It should not obscure what he did. In the second innings, several England batters were dismissed by the ball that went straight on, and the pink ball, which skids more than a red one under lights, suited his method precisely. A bowler whose threat is pace and trajectory rather than revolutions gains more from a hard, lacquered ball than a big turner does.

He then took nine more in the fourth Test at the same ground, four in the first innings and five in the second, as India won by an innings. Three matches, six five-wicket hauls or better across them counting both innings twice over, and a series that India took 3-1.

The pitch argument, honestly stated

The Ahmedabad surfaces produced a fortnight of complaint, most of it from outside India, and some of it was justified. A Test that ends in two days has not tested much. The counter-argument, which India's players made repeatedly at the time, is that the same England side had been dismissed for low scores on pitches in Asia for years and that seaming surfaces which produce two-day finishes attract less commentary.

For assessing Patel specifically, the relevant fact is that everyone bowled on the same pitches. Ashwin took thirty-two wickets in the four Tests, more than anyone. England's spinners had considerably less success on the same surfaces. A bowler taking twenty-seven at an average around ten on tracks where the opposition's specialists were taking wickets at more than double that is doing something the conditions alone do not account for.

What sort of spinner he is

The technical description is worth having, because it explains both why he is effective at home and why he has played less abroad.

Patel is tall for a finger spinner, delivers from close to the stumps and bowls at speeds that sit near the top of the range for slow left-arm, often in the high eighties and low nineties in kilometres per hour. He does not use flight as a wicket-taking weapon. His control of length is excellent and his line is relentlessly at the stumps or just outside off to the right-hander. Against left-handers he takes the ball across and away, which is a harder proposition than most left-arm spinners offer because the pace makes it difficult to leave.

On a turning pitch this is close to ideal. The batter cannot use the crease, because the ball arrives too quickly to allow a step back; he cannot come down the pitch for the same reason; and the natural variation between the ball that grips and the ball that skids does the rest. On a flat pitch abroad, the same method offers a batter a lot of deliveries that do nothing at all, and that is the limitation.

The Test career after 2021

It has been intermittent rather than continuous, and mostly for the reason that predated it. Jadeja returned. When both have been fit, Jadeja has played. Patel has appeared when Jadeja was injured or when India chose a third spinner, and he has generally taken wickets when he did.

The batting has come on considerably in that time. He is a genuine left-handed lower-order batter rather than a tail-ender who can defend, and his best Test innings have come from number eight or nine in situations where the innings needed extending. In the Nagpur Test against Australia in February 2023 he made 84 from a position where India were still behind, and India went on to win the match inside three days. The 2021-2023 World Test Championship cycle ended in a final at The Oval which India lost to Australia, but the home results that got them there rested heavily on a spin attack that could bat down to nine.

Where the 27 sits historically

Debut-series returns of this size are rare and they tend to belong to one of two categories: bowlers who go on to have very long careers, and bowlers who never repeat it. Patel is in neither cleanly. He has continued to be an excellent Test bowler in Indian conditions and has simply not played very much, because the man ahead of him is one of the better all-rounders his country has produced.

That is a specific and slightly unusual kind of career. The spin bowling tradition in India has always produced more quality than the eleven places allow, and the history is full of bowlers whose figures at home suggest they should have played twice as often. Patel's twenty-seven wickets are the strongest single argument that the queue has been costing India something, and also, awkwardly, an argument that the selection policy was working, since India won the series.

The England side he bowled at

It is fair to note who was on the receiving end. That England batting order contained Joe Root, who had made a double hundred in the first Test of the series and was in the best form of his career, and Ben Stokes. Root was dismissed repeatedly by balls that did not turn. So were several others. This was not a weak side being taken apart; it was a good one whose method against spin was built around playing for turn, meeting a bowler who mostly did not provide any.

India's own batting in that series was uneven, with Rohit Sharma the most consistent performer and Virat Kohli, then captain, scoring less heavily than the results suggested. The margins in the last three Tests were 317 runs, ten wickets and an innings. Bowling won it, and one of the two bowlers who won it was playing his first Test.

The record in short

Three Tests, twenty-seven wickets, a series won 3-1 and a place in a world final secured. For a player who had spent seven years as an international cricketer without being considered for the format, it is an unusually clean piece of evidence. For a fuller picture of his franchise and white-ball career, see the Axar Patel profile and the wider history of Indian cricket, where the pattern of surplus spin talent is a recurring feature rather than an accident of one decade.