Champions Trophy 2025 – Why Axar Patel at No. 5 has been a good idea for India
It was a moment of resounding clarity, the kind of moment that tells you everything about a cricketer.
It was the kind of situation where other batters may have looked to play out that ball and give the match situation a chance to settle. Not Axar.
Mitchell Santner floated the ball up into his arc, and this may perhaps have been deliberate, a challenge, with deep backward square leg, a squarish deep midwicket and long-on back on the leg-side boundary. “I know you like that slog-sweep,” Santner seemed to tell Axar. “Let’s see if you try one now, in this situation.”
Axar took it on, and nailed it, clearing the leaping deep midwicket fielder to his left.
The six off Santner came from the same conviction. This was a match-up Axar backed himself to dominate, left-hand batter against left-arm fingerspinner, and the ball was in his arc. How did it matter that India had just lost a wicket?
There’s no way, however, that India’s team management would have minded him trying that shot. They’ve turned him into a regular No. 5 precisely for being willing to take on those risks, and having the judgement and skill to pull them off more often than not.
“He likes to take the game on, likes to play his shots. And sometimes [when] you are in trouble, you want to always take that positive route. And with Axar, we definitely can do that. He showed it in the T20 World Cup final, which was a very, very crucial knock. Again, in that game as well, we were three down and for him to come out and bat like that was superb and got us to a decent total in the end. And that is what we expect.”
Axar’s left-handedness is a key reason too, breaking up an otherwise entirely right-handed top order. And beyond everything else, he simply has a superb all-round game against spin. In the period since the 2023 World Cup final, Axar has the best average and strike rate of all India batters against spin through the middle overs of ODIs (minimum 90 balls faced). Of the six batters who meet that cut-off, he’s the only one with either a 40-plus average or a 90-plus strike rate.
