Natarajan Debuted in Three Formats on One Tour

Thangarasu Natarajan flew to Australia in late 2020 as a net bowler. He was not in the squad for any format. Six weeks later he had played a one-day international at Canberra, three Twenty20 internationals, and a Test match at the Gabba that India won to take the series — the first cricketer to make his debut in all three formats on a single tour.

That sequence is the most remarkable thing in his career and it is also, in a way, the problem with his career. It happened because of one exceptional IPL season, it happened very fast, and almost nothing since has matched it. This page is about how a single specialised skill, executed well for eight weeks, can carry a bowler from the fringe of Tamil Nadu cricket into a Test side — and what happens when the rest of the game catches up with the skill.

The 2020 season, and the yorker

The 2020 tournament was played in the United Arab Emirates on slow, low surfaces where the ball did not carry and mishits did not clear the ring. It was the ideal season for a bowler whose entire method was the ball at the base of the stumps.

Natarajan bowled more yorkers than anybody else in that competition, and the figures back the reputation up. His computed record for that season reads sixteen matches, 377 deliveries, sixteen wickets and an economy rate of 8.02 — the most economical high-volume season of his franchise career, achieved as a death-overs bowler for Sunrisers Hyderabad in a side that reached the play-offs. The yorker that removed AB de Villiers in the eliminator against Royal Challengers Bangalore was replayed for weeks and is still the delivery most people associate with him.

The context is worth stating. A left-arm seamer who can find the blockhole on demand is one of the format's scarcest commodities, because the angle takes the ball away from a right-hander's swing and into the stumps, and because a yorker missed by six inches is a half-volley. Very few bowlers in the world can do it under pressure. In September and October 2020, on those pitches, Natarajan could do it more often than anyone.

Canberra to Brisbane

India selected him for the Australia tour as a squad net bowler, and then the injuries began. By the time the Test series reached its final match at the Gabba, India had lost so many fast bowlers that a man who had gone to bowl in practice was handed a Test cap. What he did with each debut is on the record:

Format	Date	Opponent	Figures
ODI	2 December 2020	Australia, Canberra	10 overs, 70 runs, 2 wickets
T20I	4 December 2020	Australia, Canberra	4 overs, 30 runs, 3 wickets
Test	15 January 2021	Australia, Brisbane	38.2 overs, 119 runs, 3 wickets

The Test figures are the ones that deserve a second look. A death-overs Twenty20 specialist, playing his first red-ball match at international level, on debut, in a series decider, bowled thirty-eight overs and took three wickets in a game India won by three wickets to retain the Border-Gavaskar Trophy. That was one of the great Indian away victories, achieved by a side of stand-ins, and he was one of them. It remains the only Test of his career, and among the shortest Test careers to include a series-winning appearance in India's Test history. The 2021 series in Australia is remembered for Rishabh Pant and for Mohammed Siraj; Natarajan's thirty-eight overs are part of the same story.

He played one more Twenty20 international against England in March 2021 and one more one-day international that month, and that was the end of it. Four T20Is, two ODIs, one Test.

What happened next

The honest part of this piece is the years after. The full IPL record, computed from the open ball-by-ball archive, reads 74 matches, 1,553 deliveries, 73 wickets, an economy rate of 9.19 and an average of 32.58 across eight seasons. Neither of those last two numbers is good, and the trend inside them is worse:

Season	Franchise	Matches	Wickets	Economy
2017	Kings XI Punjab	6	2	9.08
2020	Sunrisers Hyderabad	16	16	8.02
2021	Sunrisers Hyderabad	2	2	8.62
2022	Sunrisers Hyderabad	11	18	9.44
2023	Sunrisers Hyderabad	12	10	9.11
2024	Sunrisers Hyderabad	14	19	9.06
2025	Delhi Capitals	2	1	12.72
2026	Delhi Capitals	10	5	11.18

The 2022 season is genuinely good on the wicket column — eighteen in eleven matches — and 2024 produced his best figures, four for nineteen against Delhi at the Arun Jaitley Stadium. But the economy rate has climbed steadily, and the last two seasons have been expensive enough to be a real problem: 12.72 and 11.18 an over are not sustainable for a death bowler, and his appearances have fallen away accordingly.

The phase split explains where the damage is done. He has bowled 631 of his career deliveries in the last five overs, taking 47 wickets there — a strike rate of one every 13.4 balls, which is respectable — while conceding 10.16 an over. In the middle overs, where he is used less often, he strikes only once every forty-eight balls. He is a death bowler and nothing else, and when the yorker is not landing there is no second plan.

Why the skill got harder

Two things changed after 2020, and neither was his fault. The first is the surfaces: the tournament came back to India, where the ball carries and a yorker that lands a fraction short is hit over the leg-side boundary rather than dug out. The second is the batting. Modern Twenty20 batters have specifically trained for the yorker — the deep-crease scoop, the pre-meditated swing across the line, the movement inside the ball to open up the leg side — and a bowler whose plan A is the blockhole now faces batters who are waiting for exactly that.

His most frequent victims, taken across the whole career, are Nitish Rana, Ruturaj Gaikwad and Rinku Singh, three each. That is a list of good players, and it makes the point that the delivery still works when it lands. It does not land often enough any more.

The three franchises he has bowled for tell the rest. His Sunrisers years produced 65 of his 73 wickets at an economy of 8.82; his two seasons at Delhi Capitals have produced six wickets in twelve matches at 11.36 an over. A specialist whose specialism has become a liability has nowhere to go.

The argument

Natarajan is the strongest available example of how narrow a Twenty20 career can be, and how quickly the format can promote and demote the same skill. He came out of Salem in Tamil Nadu with no advantages, built a single high-value delivery to a standard almost nobody in the world matches, and cashed it for a Test cap in a series India won away in Australia. That is a genuine achievement, and the three-format debut is a record nobody can take from him.

It is also, so far, the whole of it. Seven international appearances, seventy-three franchise wickets at over thirty-two, and a delivery that a generation of batters has since learned to hit. His career page is the shape of a modern specialist: an enormous peak, a narrow base, and a competition that keeps raising the bar on the one thing he does.

Sources and method

The IPL and international match, wicket, economy, average, season and phase figures were computed from the open ball-by-ball archive; phase splits use overs 1-6, 7-15 and 16-20. IPL coverage in that archive is complete, and its Test coverage begins in 2001, so it covers his single Test in full; T20I coverage does not include India-Afghanistan Twenty20 internationals, which he did not play in. The claim that he bowled the most yorkers of the 2020 season is drawn from published tournament analysis rather than computed here, as the archive does not record delivery length. Biographical detail — Salem, the net-bowler selection, the injury sequence that opened the Gabba place — is descriptive.