Sachin Tendulkar had been watching carefully. Bhuvneshwar Kumar’s seam, he noticed, was no longer pointing anywhere in particular. Not towards slip for the outswinger, not towards leg slip for the inswinger. When the ball landed, it could go either way. The batsman’s only information arrived after the ball had already moved.
“He’s right,” Bhuvneshwar says, when asked about Sachin. “And who can observe better than him?”
This is June 2026. Sachin has just been analysing Bhuvneshwar’s wobble seam on social media. Vaibhav Sooryavanshi, 15 years old, has just broken Sachin’s 36-year record as the youngest player selected for the Indian senior team, after finishing IPL 2026 as its highest run-scorer. The boy Bhuvneshwar bowled with a knuckleball in 2025 is now the most discussed cricketer in the world. And here is Bhuvneshwar, 36, the only man to win consecutive IPL Purple Caps.
He had come to the game late, by serious cricket’s standards. When he first bowled in the nets, the coaches told him the ball was swinging. It seemed normal to him. The other kids swung it too. He didn’t know there was anything unusual about his hands until the coaches kept saying it, and even then it was only when he played under-17 cricket that he started to understand what they meant.
“I was mainly an inswinger when I started playing cricket,” he says. “Some part of the action changed — think I must have been around 15-16 perhaps. And I started outswinging. Slowly, I understood how to outswing, inswing. This is my luck. I won’t say I was born with it, or someone taught me. It was my luck that some action went wrong, but luckily I understood how to swing on both sides.”
Some actions went wrong. Most cricketers spend careers trying to prevent that. Bhuvneshwar’s career was built on it. The outswinger, the delivery that would eventually put him on the Lord’s honours board and make Tendulkar watch a video and think about seam angles, came from something he didn’t intend and couldn’t quite explain.
No one taught me how to swing on both sides,” he says. The coaches who shaped him are Vipin Vats, who also taught Praveen Kumar, and Sanjay Rastogi. Both from Meerut. He says he was lucky to have them.
At home in those years, the 10-year-old would return from training so exhausted that eating was beyond him. His mother assigned his elder sister the daily duty of feeding him as he lay sprawled on the bed. His sister would feed him while he drooled on the pillow, already asleep. In Meerut, they call a man like this a karmath cricketer. A man who believes in the work, not the mythology around it.