September 23, 2011 is a day Tushar Deshpande will never forget. He was 16 years old, playing for Mumbai Under-19s for the first time. He had not bowled well in his first match and was dropped for the second. The coach told him to join him for a walk around the ground in Gwalior.
"He started by asking what you do for education. Then he asked: what's your future in cricket? So I spontaneously told him, I'll play for India. The coach looked at me and said: 'Do you think you can play for India?' I said, yes, why not? So he started comparing me with other guys, saying, see how tall Umesh Yadav is, Dhawal Kulkarni, Zaheer Khan - all around six feet. You are just about 5' 10"."
The coach had more to say. "He then said, 'So do you feel you can go at that [high] speed and play for India? I again said yes. He said: 'If you ask me, I don't think you can go above 125kph with this height. You have good batting technique, you can start batting, or this is a very good age to try out other things.'
"I got so pissed [off], very depressed, [had] zero confidence, and I started comparing myself with others. And when you compare yourself with others, you also think poorly about yourself - that I don't have the height, I don't have the strength, I don't have the pace."
Deshpande was sent home the next day and he told his mother, Vandana, what the coach had said. "She told me, this is your choice that you started playing cricket. Never come home crying with what is happening in cricket. This is your own battle. You have to fight it out there. If you can fight it out, continue playing cricket, otherwise you can leave your bag outside and stop playing cricket."
In July this year, Deshpande, at 29, made his international debut, in India's fourth T20I in Zimbabwe. "The moment I was informed I was going to make the debut, I first called my dad and asked him: 'How do you feel that your son is now going to debut for India?' He got emotional, started to talk about my [late] mother. I tried hard to mask my emotions during the call. And then I got back to my process: that no matter it's the India debut, I have to give my best and be there for my team, which has been my attitude since I started playing cricket - that I'm on the ground to make a difference for it."
Deshpande's father, Uday, is his first idol. He was a left-arm fast bowler who played B Division cricket on Mumbai's professional circuit.
"He won't show his emotion on the face because he has taught me that we should be like soldiers," Deshpande says of his father. "Whatever we feel should be beneath [the surface] and the outside world shouldn't know about it. That is [one of] the biggest things he has taught me."
Deshpande is a stocky fast bowler - built like his friend and Mumbai team-mate Shardul Thakur - and his strength lies in his ability to shape the ball away and hit the deck hard, consistently clocking speeds around 140kph. In the last two years he has been the best seamer at Chennai Super Kings, and is in the India D team playing the first-class Duleep Trophy, ahead of India A and India's tours of Australia starting November.
Seven years ago, during his debut first-class season, Deshpande injured his ankle and was ruled out of the Ranji Trophy after playing only eight games. Two months later his mother was diagnosed with stage three ovarian cancer.
During those days, Uday, on unpaid leave from work, would sit with his wife at the hospital for treatment from 6am to 1pm. Deshpande, after travelling two hours from Kalyan to Andheri to do his rehab, would relieve his father in the afternoon and stay at the hospital for six hours before heading home to exercise some more at his makeshift gym.
In June that year, Deshpande had ankle surgery after it was determined he had been wrongly diagnosed with a stress fracture originally earlier in the year. "There were two patients at home, me and my mom. I was on crutches and my mom was having chemotherapy - 2017 was a hell of a year for us," he says.
By December, Deshpande had recovered to play his only match of 2017, an Under-23 game for Mumbai. In 2018, just when the family thought Vandana was responding to chemotherapy, the cancer returned and her health deteriorated. Deshpande says it was dispiriting to see his mother lose weight swiftly, not eat and not speak.
"That one and a half years or so taught me a lot. I used to go to the gym at eight in evening after staying with my mom, work out till 10 or 11 at night, run in the night and do all sorts of things. It taught me how to be humble about life."
Deshpande had a fruitful 2018-19 season in domestic cricket, although emotionally he was distraught. In March 2019, Vandana died at the age of 55.
"I cried a lot thinking about her," Deshpande says. "Sometimes I still cry thinking about her. But at that time my dad told me the same thing: 'We are soldiers in life. You have to prioritise your cricket, which your mom always told you to. And if you do this now, if you play for India later on, that's how you'll fulfil her dream also.'"
Two days after his mother's death, Deshpande, at his father's behest, travelled to Indore to play the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy and took four wickets against Delhi. That season he also took 17 wickets at 16.6 in four Ranji games and played a key hand in Mumbai winning the 50-over Vijay Hazare Trophy after 12 years.
Deshpande says he clocked average speeds of around 140kph in the Vijay Hazare Trophy. "I felt whatever happened way back in September 2011, that is still with me and I have proved myself [worthy]."
In the next IPL auction, Delhi Capitals bought him for his base price of Rs 20 lakhs (about US$24,000) for the 2020 season. At the IPL, he met his idol Dale Steyn, who helped him understand the only way to become a good player is to press repeat every day on your basics and your routines and to pay attention to fitness.
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He might hide his emotions, but at times when someone has stirred them, it has only managed to bring the best out of Deshpande.
Last March, on the first day of Mumbai's Ranji semi-final , Deshpande prised out the Tamil Nadu middle order with a three-wicket haul. It's a performance he values dearly and he reveals that the aggressive spell was triggered by the anger he felt towards his own captain, Ajinkya Rahane.
"Suddenly in the morning they tell me that you are bowling first-change. I got angry because I was ready to bowl with the new ball. I had warmed up with the new ball and I was bowling the new ball the whole season. They felt the other guy [another Mumbai fast bowler] had a niggle and dropped his pace and the management thought he would be better off bowling with the new ball [than bending his back with the older one - as Deshpande, with his pace, could do]. They told me later that was the reason. I told him he should have conveyed it earlier."
Rahane told Deshpande to channel his anger into his bowling. "I told him I was definitely going to do that," Deshpande says, acknowledging that Rahane is, in fact, a very good captain and person, "always putting the team first", just like his captain at CSK, MS Dhoni.
During this time, Deshpande also closely observed how fit fast bowlers like Jasprit Bumrah, Bhuvneshwar Kumar and Mohammed Shami were, which allowed them to excel on the field. In 2021 he started working with strength and conditioning coach Vidhi Sanghvi and hired a physio and a nutritionist for his needs. Deshpande now weighs 78kg, having dropped nine kilos since 2021. Discipline and fitness have allowed him to build on his pace.
The bigger transformation on the field came once Deshpande played for Super Kings in 2022, although the education began right from when he joined the franchise as a net bowler for the UAE leg of the 2021 IPL.
"When I joined, my thinking was: if you have to succeed at the international level, you need a lot of variations, lots of skill sets, you need to outfox the batsman, try different angles [from the crease]. But from Eric Simons [CSK"s assistant coach] to Dwayne Bravo [who was playing until 2022 before turning bowling coach in 2023], to Mahi [Dhoni], these guys told me: it's simple. The more often you hit that length and top of off stump, have a good and accurate yorker and a good bouncer, you'll succeed in any format. Because these days predictable is becoming the unpredictable. Batsmen want you to falter, want you to try different things. But as a bowler what you can do is bowl that attacking length."
Michael Hussey, CSK's assistant batting coach, echoed those insights. "I asked him: which was the ball you didn't expect after hitting a four? He said: the same ball again. He said batsmen feed on chaos in T20 cricket. They want bowlers to bowl on both sides of the wicket. But at CSK, the plan has been always about pitching on the attacking line, top of off stump."
That power of repeatability helped Deshpande during a home game against a rampaging Sunrisers Hyderabad line-up in April this year .
"Both [Travis] Head and Abhishek [Sharma] had hit me for a six each [in the first over of the innings]. They might have expected me to change my bowling plan. I didn't change anything. I bowled an offcutter on the same line - back of length on off stump. Head hit it straight to Daryl Mitchell at deep point. Against Abhishek, I bowled back of a length on off stump at normal pace. Nothing extraordinary. But the field placement was good [Mitchell took it again at deep point]."
He got to play only two matches in 2022, but injuries to frontline bowlers allowed Deshpande to be picked for the entire season in 2023.
During the preparatory camp in Chennai ahead of the 2023 season, Dhoni took Deshpande on a walk around Chepauk for a chat. Deshpande recalls: "[Dhoni told me]: 'You have everything to succeed at international level. But you have to be calm during your run-up. Don't get distracted by the crowd. Just take a deep breath, stay calm and bowl.' If Mahi tells you that you have everything to be successful at international level, boss, that itself is an achievement."
CSK went on to win their fifth IPL title and Deshpande was their highest wicket-taker and joint fifth-highest overall.
But Deshpande's season was bookended by two blistering assaults against him, both by Gujarat Titans batters in Ahmedabad, in the season opener and the final. In the first match he took 1 for 51 in 3.2 overs.
"Mahi came to me and said: 'You haven't made any mistakes. You bowled all good balls. It was not your day today. In the next match repeat the same."
The advice was in the same vein as what Dhoni had told him during their first conversation back in 2021: "Cricket is the same at all levels. We just try to complicate it unnecessarily."
Back then Deshpande didn't quite understand what Dhoni was trying to tell him. They were facing each other in the nets, working on a match simulation.
"I was bowling good yorkers, but suddenly I bowled a bouncer and got hit for a 100-metre six. He asked me: 'Kyun daala bouncer?' [Why did you bowl the bouncer?] I told him I thought he was expecting the yorker. He told me: Don't play cricket in the mind. Yorker is a yorker and no one can hit you.
"He was telling me we keep trying to play ahead of the game instead of staying in the present. The other thing he told me is to focus on my fitness, which is important for fast bowlers."
In the 2023 final Deshpande finished his four overs with 0 for 56 .
"Mahi told me in that final I had done things that I had not done in the entire tournament. For example, when I was bowling to Sai Sudharsan, I did not place a fielder back to guard myself again the scoop. I had done that against others like Suryakumar Yadav or Jos Buttler. I had underestimated Sudharsan and had placed the fielder inside the ring. Mahi said: Never do that. In a crunch situation like a final, always back your strengths and keep doing what is giving you success."
By the 2024 season, Deshpande had become CSK's strike bowler and was handling the challenge of bowling in the final four overs of an innings. He had another great mentor to lean on - Bravo, one of the best death bowlers in T20. The introduction of the Impact Player had allowed the use of an extra batter through the 20 overs and teams were regularly breaching the 200-run mark.
Deshpande credits Bravo for helping him stay calm in the crucial death overs. "He said to always bowl to the bigger side of the field while always bowling your best ball. The message is: I am going to dictate my plan. If you have the guts, hit me on my plan.
"I will cite the example of me bowling to Rashid Khan in qualifier 1 against Titans at Chepauk. Rashid had hit Matheesha Pathirana for six and four in the 16th over. Then he picked me for a six and a four in the 17th, and a four off the first ball of the 19th over.
"I stayed focused on bowling the wide yorker towards the bigger boundary, which was our bowling plan. Rashid sliced [the third ball of the 19th over] straight to the deep-point fielder and the match was sealed and we got into the final. If that was the smaller side, it would have ended up being a six.
"That is a Dwayne Bravo mantra: under pressure when you are defending a score, there is no need for bluffing - always stick to your plan."
Deshpande has three variations: the offcutter, the conventional yorker and the wide yorker. But with guidance from Bravo, he is learning the art of sequencing his deliveries - a key skill for successful death bowlers. Deshpande says that is why his offcutter is more effective because he uses it alongside his two other variations and attacks the batter when he is least expecting it.
He has worked hard to build a career from the day the coach back in 2011 said he didn't believe Deshpande had the skills to become a fast bowler and play for India. Deshpande says he aims for things that are "difficult but achievable", words he once had heard a mental conditioning coach say during his U-16 years.
His next goal is an obvious one. "Ultimate goal is to play Test cricket. And my aim is to pick up 100 wickets in Tests for India."