Harshal Patel has gone through the rigours of domestic cricket for almost a decade before he made his debut against New Zealand in Ranchi on Friday. It has taught him to be patient in life, a trait that helped him develop as a cricketer.

“Mindset, being able to decipher wheat from chaff, is in itself a skill, is in itself a talent. It’s something that I won’t say was innate in me, but I learned through experiences,” Harshal said after his Man of the Match-award winning performance. “I was not born with it. I was a very impetuous, very impatient person growing up. Life sort of teaches you these things if you don’t know them… That is something that my process of 10 years in domestic cricket has taught me. All the failures I’ve had through these 10 years have taught me that you need to be patient.

“People don’t talk enough about patience... If you want to make a change, you need to allow yourself enough time to sort of figure that out. If you keep jumping from one place to another in your mindset, that’s not going to work for you.”

He also spoke about how he benefited from the lateral flex in his bowling action.

“I always wanted to correct that, because we are told that you are more injury-prone if you don’t correct that,” he said. “Also the height of your delivery gets reduced if you have a lateral flexion and you won’t get a lot of bounce. But what I realised after playing 7-8 years of domestic cricket is, that lateral flexion gave me an angle which was difficult for batters to line up to.

“That made my slower balls more effective. If I talk about red-ball cricket, that big angle allows me to bowl outswingers from a very tight line and beat the batters when it straightens. So I started looking at that as an advantage.”