AHMEDABAD: In the last week of Feb in 2021, Axar Patel’s international career truly got rolling here at the revamped Narendra Modi stadium when he played the lead role in demolishing England in the Test series. The three preceding years out of the Indian team had already transformed him as a cricketer. Five years later, he will be stepping on to his home turf as a core member of the leadership group when the T20 World Cup enters its business end with India taking on South Africa on Sunday. Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. SUBSCRIBE NOW!In a chat with TOI in Jan, Axar claimed those three years out of the Indian team helped him identify the areas to work on to be a better person and understand what he needed to become a better cricketer.
Axar’s carefree and funny-to-the-bone on-screen demeanour, often ending up as memes, gains more traction on social media. He likes to keep everything around him as uncomplicated as possible. That said, for all the riches he has earned through cricket, he prefers building a new swanky house in his hometown in Nadiad which is around 60 km from Ahmedabad. He rushes to his comfort place in Nadiad when he isn’t with the Indian team. Yet, the process he follows to stay on top as an international cricketer is as rigorous and detailed as any. The extensive training sessions are all scheduled at the GS Patel Stadium in the Kheda district. It’s just that he has formed a safe and strong core team outside Indian cricket. Leading that team is his wife Meha, charting out his diet. “Meha is a qualified dietician. Even if he is travelling with the Indian team, he gets every meal cleared by Meha,” Axar’s childhood friend and confidant Keval Patel in Nadiad told TOI. “He comes gets a longish break from the Indian team maybe a couple of times in a year. He loves to eat cheese vada paav and laze with us when he comes here. Meha doesn’t stop him from eating but adjusts the next few meals accordingly,” Keval mentioned. Much of Axar’s evolution as a cricketer and as a batter in particular happened at the GS Patel stadium. Axar took it on himself to renovate the gym with very basic facilities and turn it into a high-end fitness centre for the youngsters in the region. “He usually follows the routine given to him by the support staff in the BCCI. But he realised that the local kids also need better facilities. Five years ago, he said he will fund the renovation of the gym. The gym has pictures of all the top Indian cricketers mounted on the wall,” said Keval. Soon, Keval talked about Axar’s meticulous cricket training drills. Before joining the Indian team for this T20 World Cup, he had a session with the Delhi Capitals team in Delhi where he trained for batting after the 15th over of the innings. He was probably intimated by the team management he would be needed to bat lower down the order unlike in the preceding assignments. “He plans training sessions according to different batting situations. He bats for four-five hours a day for the last five-six years. On certain days, he will be practicing against the new ball. On other days, he will bat on the centre square, practicing only power-hitting,” Keval revealed. In the chat with TOI, Axar said he regained confidence in his batting after MS Dhoni asked him to think like a regular batter around 2018 and he could work on it with Ricky Ponting’s backing at the Capitals from 2019. And what drills does he do for his bowling? “He just does spot bowling. His only focus is to get his pitching right. He will be hitting the same spot for a long period of time, varying pace and angles,” Keval said. Axar’s utility batting has overshadowed Axar the left-arm spinner in the last year or so made more headlines in the past year. But it’s hard to discount his consistent contributions with the ball after enduring a deluge of barbs from experts for the first half of his international career. In 2021, he had told TOI that he started believing he must be a special bowler to have made it this far without being a conventional left-arm spinner. “I did talk with R Ashwin but he does some really deep thinking. I can’t do that,” Axar had joked. It’s been a long journey for India’s one of the most understated cricketers in the last five years. The next two and a half weeks could propel him to becoming a poster boy of Indian cricket.
