Digvesh Rathi was extraordinary in IPL 2025, taking 14 wickets in 13 innings at an economy rate of 8.25. ESPNcricinfo’s SmartStats counted his contribution as 19.5 wickets once the value of those scalps was factored in. Among wrist-spinners, he was as good as anyone in the competition.
Then 2026 arrived, and something broke. Five wickets in eight innings. An economy of 10. The same bowler, a completely different story.
What changed?
The unravelling of Digvesh Rathi from IPL 2025 to 2026: A look at four potential factors
1. Have the pitches changed?
The most charitable reading of any bowler’s decline is that the conditions changed. If surfaces grip less and home tracks flatten out, the numbers can look catastrophic without anything being wrong with the bowler himself. A declining spinner might just be a spinner playing on worse pitches.
So I checked the coefficient of friction – a surface metric measuring how much the pitch grips the ball – across all of Rathi’s deliveries in both seasons. The higher the CoF, the more grip the pitch offers. The lower the CoF, the skiddier the surface, i.e. less helpful.
| Surface metric | 2025 median | 2026 median | Note |
| CoF | 0.260 | 0.251 | Negligible difference |
| Lucknow CoF | 0.251 | 0.248 | Home surface essentially unchanged |
The numbers barely moved. Even isolating Lucknow specifically – where any home surface shift should have been most visible – the difference was negligible.
This wasn’t a “the pitches stopped helping him” story.
Which meant the explanation had to come from somewhere else.
2. The variation mix
I moved one layer deeper and pulled his variation breakdown across both seasons.
| Variation | 2025 (%) | 2026 (%) | Δ |
| Googly | 57.7% | 33.9% | −23.8 pp |
| Leg Spinner | 30.3% | 44.3% | +14.0 pp |
| Quicker Ball | 7.1% | 15.6% | +8.5 pp |
| Carrom Ball | 3.5% | 6.2% | +2.7 pp |
| Off Break | 1.3% | 0.0% | −1.3 pp |
In 2025, Rathi bowled the googly nearly three deliveries in every five. It was his primary weapon – the ball he built his threat around. In 2026, that dropped to one in three. The legspinner became his most common delivery instead, and the quicker ball more than doubled in share.
That’s a significant change. The question was whether it was working.
| Variation | 2025 Batter Control % | 2026 Batter Control % | Δ |
| Googly | 79.9% | 68.8% | −11.1 pp |
| Leg Spinner | 79.8% | 89.4% | +9.6 pp |
It wasn’t. Batters were less comfortable against the googly in 2026, but they were considerably more comfortable against the leg spinner.
So here is what I had: he’s bowling fewer of his best ball, and more of a ball batters are playing more comfortably. But this still felt incomplete. I needed to look at his line and length too, before any interpretation could hold.
| Line | 2025 (%) | 2026 (%) |
| On the stumps | 46.5% | 37.0% |
| Outside off stump | 41.9% | 52.6% |
| Down leg | 11.3% | 8.3% |
| Wide outside off | 0.3% | 2.1% |
| Length | 2025 (%) | 2026 (%) |
| Good length | 60.3% | 51.0% |
| Short of good length | 14.8% | 24.0% |
| Full | 23.2% | 21.4% |
| Short | 1.6% | 3.1% |
He was bowling further outside off stump and shorter. Good-length deliveries dropped nearly ten percentage points. Short-of-good-length almost doubled.
But was this happening against all batters, or only certain types of batters?
3. The handedness mix
I broke his variation usage down by batter type across both seasons. The answer was immediate.
| Season | vs RHB (n) | Dominant variation | vs LHB (n) | Dominant variation |
| 2025 | 169 | Leg Spinner: 52.1% | 141 | Googly: 89.4% |
| 2026 | 145 | Leg Spinner: 52.4% | 47 | Googly: 46.8%, QB: 23.4%, LS: 19.1% |
Against right-handers, almost nothing changed. The legspinner remained dominant at roughly 52% in both seasons. The profile was essentially stable.
Against left-handers, it collapsed. In 2025, Rathi bowled the googly at left-handers 89.4% of the time – nearly every delivery. In 2026, that dropped to 46.8%, with quicker balls and legspinners filling the gap.
Wait. If the overall change in variation mix was almost entirely against left-handers, and the overall numbers looked so different, then why did the right-hander numbers shift at all?
That question led somewhere interesting. I looked at control percentages broken down by batter hand and variation.
| Season | Bat Hand | Variation | Batter Control % | n |
| 2025 | LHB | Googly | 77.0% | 126 |
| 2026 | LHB | Googly | 81.0% | 21 |
| 2025 | RHB | Googly | 86.8% | 53 |
| 2026 | RHB | Googly | 62.8% | 43 |
| 2025 | RHB | Leg Spinner | 78.4% | 88 |
| 2026 | RHB | Leg Spinner | 88.2% | 76 |
Right-handers were dealing with the googly much less comfortably in 2026 (batter control fell from 86.8% to 62.8% – a 24-point improvement for Rathi). Against left-handers the googly had softened slightly, though the sample of 21 deliveries is too small to hold firmly.
But the legspinner against right-handers had gone in the wrong direction: 78.4% batter control in 2025, compared to 88.2% in 2026. Right-handers were playing it more comfortably, despite no apparent change in how often Rathi bowled it.
Something had changed about how he was bowling these deliveries, not just how often.
4. The line and length of each variation
Googly — Line
| Context | On stumps | Outside off | Down leg |
| 2025 vs RHB (n=53) | 35.8% | 60.4% | 3.8% |
| 2026 vs RHB (n=43) | 58.1% | 41.9% | 0% |
| 2025 vs LHB (n=126) | 54.8% | 24.6% | 20.6% |
| 2026 vs LHB (n=22) | 31.8% | 54.5% | 9.1% |
Against right-handers, the googly’s line shifted dramatically. In 2025, 60.4% of his googlies to right-handers finished outside off stump. In 2026, 58.1% finished on the stumps instead. He’s cramping right-handers now – the ball isn’t just turning in, it’s arriving at the stumps. That probably explains why they’re in less control.
Against left-handers the opposite happened. In 2025 he attacked the stumps 54.8% of the time. In 2026 he drifted wide – finishing outside off stump 54.5% of the time, allowing room rather than denying it.
Googly — Length
| Context | Good length | Short of good | Full |
| 2025 vs RHB (n=53) | 49.1% | 24.5% | 24.5% |
| 2026 vs RHB (n=43) | 51.2% | 27.9% | 20.9% |
| 2025 vs LHB (n=126) | 57.9% | 14.3% | 26.2% |
| 2026 vs LHB (n=22) | 45.5% | 31.8% | 13.6% |
Against right-handers, length remained stable. Against left-handers, the googly got noticeably shorter – good-length share fell from 57.9% to 45.5%, and short-of-good-length nearly doubled to 31.8%. This compounds the line problem: wider and shorter, giving left-handers more room to free their arms. The sample is only 22 deliveries, so confidence here is limited, but the direction is clear.
Leg Spinner vs RHB — Length
| Season | Good length | Short of good | Full |
| 2025 (n=88) | 69.3% | 8.0% | 21.6% |
| 2026 (n=76) | 52.6% | 17.1% | 27.6% |
The leg spinner against right-handers got significantly shorter too. Good-length deliveries fell from 69.3% to 52.6%. Short-of-good-length nearly doubled. He’s not landing it in the same area, and right-handers have responded accordingly by playing it better.
Conclusion: What do we draw from these figures?
In the end, nothing dramatic went wrong with Digvesh Rathi.
The pitches largely stayed the same in terms of grip. It came down to small shifts in how he bowled. He used his best ball less often against left-handers, while subtle shifts in line and length gave batters more room to operate.
In the IPL, success often rests on these fine margins. Rathi mastered those margins in 2025. In 2026, they slipped away. The challenge now is finding them again.
