The year is 2025. Left-arm spinner Vaishnavi Sharma made her T20I debut for India against Sri Lanka in Visakhapatnam. She went wicketless but conceded only 16 runs in her four-over spell. After the game, she was snapped sheepishly skirting around the press conference room entrance.

“ That's what happened with me. (My worst nightmare has come true),” a nervous Vaishnavi then told the BCCI videoperson tailing players for their post-match vlog.

Almost a year and seven India fixtures later, Vaishnavi – now 14 wickets old in international cricket – was not any less nervous entering the sprawling but sparsely populated media room at the BCA Stadium in Kotambi. She had just taken a sensational five-wicket haul to help India seal the third ODI against Zimbabwe. This after coolly picking four wickets in the second fixture a few days earlier.

“ What is it like? (Is that so?) I am surprised,” Chandrakant Pandit, Director of Cricket at the Madhya Pradesh Cricket Association, exclaims on hearing about her jitters.

The Vaishnavi he knows is not someone he associates fear or hesitation with.

“When I began at Madhya Pradesh in this capacity, I was looking for young talent to give them exposure. Vaishnavi was around 13 then, if I remember correctly,” he tells Sports stars.

“We had a truncated BCCI short-format tournament right after the COVID-19 pandemic. BCCI allowed us to field a squad of 22 because no one could enter or leave the biobubble. Vaishnavi was selected and immediately showed promise. It was more her attitude than her bowling. So I put that 13-year-old with the senior team.”

Pandit is not an easy man to impress. He’s known to like discipline and order. So him saying this was the most confident he’d seen a player when approaching him is something. He quite happily played into that confidence by constantly saying, “You should be playing for India.”

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Delayed, not denied

Vaishnavi has not been a regular starter in the national side. India’s experiments with a seam-heavy attack and fellow left-arm tweaker N. Sree Charani’s meteoric success means Vaishnavi has had to bite her cheek and wait. She was also not selected for India’s T20 World Cup campaign in England and Wales a few months ago.

“ His fate is like this, from the beginning (Something about her destiny has always been like this),” her childhood coach and relative, Lovekesh Chaudhary, says.

“In the U-19 T20 World Cup, she wasn’t picked first, but was later chosen and did splendidly. In the Women’s Premier League, she didn’t get picked first and was then roped in as a replacement and then she also missed out in this senior World Cup. With Vaishnavi, things get delayed, but they eventually happen. She’s not the one to sit back and feel bad that a chance was lost. She is beyond this stuff. It pushes her even more,” he explains.

Having two left-arm spinners opens both up for scrutiny, often by being pitted against each other. Sree Charani is a taller bowler and fast through the air. Vaishnavi is shorter, more loopy and uses her fingers to give the ball more revolutions. Sree Charani likes squeezing the batter for space while Vaishnavi draws them out, uses width to then trick them with turn.

If you ask Chaudhary, he vouches for his ward being the better fielder among the two too!

But Vaishnavi knows comparisons barely matter if one doesn’t use the chance presented to them. It’s what helped her dust off the disappointment of missing out on the World Cup.

“The months between my T20I debut and now were good only (even if I missed the tournament),” Vaishnavi said after the game on Wednesday.

“I got a good gap to work on myself, to get stronger physically and mentally. It gave me space to figure out the requirements of the game, be it with the ball, bat or in the field. I had the space to develop my game a little more,” she added.

During this time, Chaudhary, her ‘Chandu sir’, coaches at the Madhya Pradesh team, the BCCI’s Centre of Excellence and Indian bowling coach Aavishkar Salvi were voices in her airwaves. But this wasn’t a ‘too many cooks’ situation. There was synergy in what everyone wanted Vaishnavi to master.

“First, (they taught me) to stay calm,” she chuckled. “They wanted me to follow the batter from start to finish and repeat that constantly to get better results.”

Bhawna Srivastava, the MP U-19 women’s coach, remembers that desperation to play bringing an inkling of scrambled doubt to her approach to cricket.

“Serious conversations with her happen rarely. She spoke about working on her batting too so she could evolve as an all-rounder. It’s hard to stay patient, but it is important. Just one wall had to break and she’d get through,” she says.

The value of repetition

Training under Chaudhary and at the MCA had some fortunate intersections. Both involved mixed gender training hours. Both believed in allowing youngsters time with senior players for skills to evolve. Somewhere, it also helped Vaishnavi figure out settling into a side with people far more experienced than she was. Much like the Indian national team.

“Vaishnavi played in the higher divisions and also with the U-19 boys in training. Yashbardhan Singh Chauhan, who has captained the India U-19 team, is among the players who train at my academy (Tansen Academy). There are a few others who have played Cooch Behar and Ranji Trophy. Vaishnavi has trained alongside them,” Chaudhary explains.

Whenever Vaishnavi is home in Gwalior, training goes on for a six-hour block from morning till evening with Lovekesh. Besides facing bigger players, she has also worked extensively on using the crease, using her fingers to give more revolutions to the ball and more. There’s also knowledge exchange with fellow spinners at training on a given day.

Bhawna, who saw Vaishnavi as a raw spinner eager to master control, believes her probing quality as a person trumps that same gene as a player.

“She was quite curious right from the start. The mindset was to keep taking wickets and she’d have a lot of questions if they weren’t and chart out the next course of action. She always wants to learn, it is why she has made it this far,” she elaborates.

In the two ODIs she featured in at Kotambi, Vaishnavi hurled her bag of variations at the Zimbabweans, who had no answers. Her 37 dots bowled in the second game were the joint-second-most (along with Sayali Satghare), while she had 46 dot balls, the best in the third fixture.

“She bowled from around the wicket because the batter was stepping out. These are things she didn’t instinctively know before, good to see her implementing the things she is learning,” Bhawna adds.

Target practice became a key part of training.

“ Tried to get more control over the ball (I’ve worked on gaining more control of the ball). I worked on a single wicket and bowled deliveries into one particular spot. It’s a simple strategy with a focus on the stump line. My coaches also pushed me to have greater belief in my stock ball,” Vaishnavi explained.

She’s also tried to use potentially slow surfaces, like the one the BCA strip eventually became, to even attempt innovations within variations.

“If you can manage more revs on the ball, it will turn and you could also deploy the arm ball against certain batters. It was a good bowling wicket.”

Despite not being as tall as someone like Sree Charani, Vaishnavi could naturally dip the ball, something Chaudhary calls ‘a natural gift’. Her evolving flight, however, has come from years of innovating against older players and taller male batters in training.

“When she started out, there weren’t many revs on the ball when she bowled. We made her understand that the ball spin is in our hands. Getting turn or not, meanwhile, isn’t; that’s on the wicket. We see her doing drills to keep the rotating in the hand,” Bhawna explains.

“So we do see a marked importance in how she’s doing. She’s able to spin the ball on any kind of wicket and manage decent turn in the process. It’s a big plus point.”

Just one flipside though. An intelligent cricketer also always wants the validation of return. Wickets are a bit of an obsession for the cherubic tweaker.

“I called her after she took four wickets in the second game. Towards the end, she kept saying, “ God, give me one more wicket (God, please give me one more wicket),” and the TV mics caught it. So I told her Tell me what are you thinking, son, everyone is listening.! (Speak carefully, Vaishnavi, everyone’s listening),” Chaudhary quips.

“But in all that fun and games, there’s aggression. She is hungry for wickets and is a fighter,” he adds, proudly.

For Pandit, the worry has always been to ensure confidence doesn’t spillover to overconfidence.

“She is a bold bowler and feels like she needs to deploy variations with every ball she bowls. I keep telling her that it might not always work and might not always be necessary. You can learn to settle into a rhythm and then change it up. But His mantra is always that wickets have to be taken by me and I can do anything for that. (I want a wicket at any cost). I keep reminding her that it might backfire if she loses her line. She’s a matchwinner but needs to stay grounded as well,” he explains.

The impact of that intervention is visible. Vaishnavi was expensive on ODI debut against Australia in Hobart earlier this year, going at 8.5 runs an over in her four-over spell. Zimbabwe is a weaker batting side, but she will be buoyed by a stingy 3.9 economy rate. In the third game, though, constantly varying the line and length also yielded a no ball and five wides, something Pandit has noted down for later.

Bhawna silently hopes the innocence in her finds a way to endure.

“That excitement she has, that’s what makes a player perform. Once that goes away, one starts getting very jaded with their craft. I hope she finds a way to keep that sense of wonder in her as she goes along,” she says.

The work doesn’t stop for the 20-year-old. She’s already called Pandit to book coaching blocks.

“She’s already said, I will return to the main 29 tarik, will I be able to join the main senior team?? (I am back on October 29, can I go with the senior team?) She’s a bold girl. This is only the start,” he adds.

Vaishnavi has been late to every list and and early to every wicket, and sooner or later, history will stop keeping track of the difference.

Published on Oct 29, 2026