At 36, Jadeja is as good as they get
Ravindra Jadeja has now been playing ODI cricket for 16 years. Not sure how much of it he's got left in the tank but he's still a top draw in the format.
England’s tour of India has concluded on the night that I start penning this article down. A thumping 4-1 win in the T20 series and a clean sweep in the ODIs marks a lot of positives (and some ambiguities around team selection?) ahead of the Champions Trophy. There were a handful of spectacles on this tour. Brook being spun around in Chakaravarthy’s web, Abhishek Sharma scoring the highest T20I score by an Indian batter, Rohit Sharma hitting an ODI ton to show the world that he’s still got it, just to name a few. But the one that stood out to me, one that’s going to stay with me for a while, was Jadeja’s brilliance in the ODI leg of the tour. He played the first two games and was instrumental in India sealing the series.
In the 2 games that Jadeja played, he bowled 19 overs and bagged 6 wickets; the second highest in the series despite sitting out the third game. His average was the lowest by quite some distance from all bowlers, and unsurprisingly so.
He was bang on every ball he bowled, bowling tighter lines, varying his speeds, adjusting his lengths, the man could do no wrong. He took the ball mostly in the middle phase of the innings (overs 11-40) and kept England’s scoring rate in check all while picking crucial wickets (Joe Root in both the games, and Duckett and Bethell once each). Jadeja maxed out on all the tools in his artillery, as he has been doing for India across formats for years now but manages to go just that tad bit unnoticed each time.
A slow left-arm spinner (SLA) has a variety of tricks up their sleeve. Bowling round the wicket to right-handers, they create a challenging angle, generate movement off the pitch, and vary their seam position, speed, and release angle to induce drift and skid. All these elements can pose serious problems for a batter, and Jadeja executes them with remarkable precision.
Jadeja’s prowess doesn’t come from deception—he’s anything but a mystery bowler. Sure, his deliveries are hard to put away, but batters can still make contact. In fact, during the England series, Jadeja recorded the lowest control percentage (88.6%)—tied with Axar Patel and Kuldeep Yadav. But where he truly excels in LOIs is his defensive precision. He relentlessly hits good lengths, keeps the stumps in play, and applies relentless pressure—old-school tricks that never lose their effectiveness.
Take the England ODIs as a case in point. Jadeja landed 61% of his deliveries on a good length. By consistently pitching in line and using the variable bounce on offer to his advantage, he kept the stumps in play and forced batters into caution. That was his primary line of defense. But there was more to it.
Particularly in the Nagpur ODI, where he finished with figures of 3/35 in 10 overs. All three of his wickets came from deliveries bowled with an almost identical release point and a similar seam position (slightly varied flatness to the 3rd ball — tilted slightly towards first slip to facilitate away spin. He also bowled these deliveries at a slightly slower pace with increased revs, maximizing drift and turn. The image below illustrates the seam position for each of those dismissals, from the first to the third wicket (left to right).
Since 2016, out of the 72 spinners to have bowled more than 1,000 deliveries in ODIs, Jadeja has the highest % of balls bowled at a good length at 62.1%, just a notch below Moeen Ali who’s in second at 61.9%.
(The color scheme in this graph might be a bit unpleasant to the eye, but the orange is a tribute to Jadeja’s days with the Gujarat Lions in the IPL)
To assess just how well Jadeja has fared over the years, because the eye test says he’s done rather well, I mapped his performance against that of the other SLA bowlers in the same games that he bowled in.
A relative average equal to 1 means that SLAs other than Jadeja have conceded exactly the same runs per wicket taken as him. Similarly for SR, that equal to 1 would mean the number of balls per wicket is the same for Jadeja and his contemporaries.
A relative average of 1.61, as observed in 2023, tells us that Jadeja picked up his wickets at 1.61 times fewer runs than the other SLAs bowled in the same innings. Barring 2012 and 2019, Jadeja has observed a positive Relative Average and Relative SR as compared to his peer SLAs in every year since his debut in ODIs. Remarkable, but expected.
Surely these numbers bring a host of biases with them. Teams generally don’t have more than one SLA in their playing XI, and the few times they have the one, he often isn’t the first-choice spinner, not the guy who bowls out his quota of 10 overs. In order to avert this study of any issues, I further drilled this down to compare his performance against all spin bowlers in the same games as him, and expectantly so, it tinkers the figures quite a bit.
Here’s a guy who burst onto the scene as a promising bowling all-rounder, dominated between 2016 and 2018—outshining any spinner he was compared to—before experiencing a dip in form for a few years. However, he rediscovered his best in 2023, playing 23 matches, his second highest in a calendar year after 34 in 2013. Now, in 2025, he has maintained—or even surpassed—that momentum.
Being a bowler in ODIs is often a thankless job. Being a bowling all-rounder? Even tougher. And if you happen to be a spin-bowling all-rounder, well, good luck—because in the grand scheme of things, you’ll always be overshadowed by your pace-bowling counterparts. Unless you’re Bumrah or Akram, it’s almost impossible to carve out a legacy that stands as a benchmark. And honestly, I’m hesitant to even name a spinner here without someone calling me biased.
The reality is, making a name for yourself as an ODI bowler—someone who defines an era, a paradigm others are measured against—is incredibly rare. If Chaminda Vaas, with over 300 ODI wickets and the best bowling figures in the format’s history, still ends up in a Wisden video about underrated players, then what chance does Jadeja have?
Jadeja currently has 2,779 runs at an average of 32 and 226 wickets at an average of 35. Pushing 37 and still a vital part of India’s Test setup, his ODI retirement might not be far away—perhaps after the Champions Trophy. And while I’m not suggesting he’s an all-time great in the format, the fact that I could write 1,100 words on his ODI exploits without even mentioning his batting says a lot.
He’s been a valuable asset, to say the least, and when he finally steps away, the void he leaves behind won’t be easy to fill. The current crop of players might try, but it’s bound to shake up the team’s stability. So, while we still have him, let’s appreciate the brilliance of Ravindra Jadeja.