DISCIPLINE is the key in sport, more so in a team game where one unforced error can have calamitous consequences for the team. India’s below par fielding and bowling performance in the ongoing T 20 and one day series is a cause of major concern. When fielders like Yuvraj Singh and Virat Kohli begin dropping sitters, you get the jitters.
The abrupt sacking of Robin Singh and Vekatesh Prasad has undoubtedly left some sort of a void. I am not saying that they were the right men for the job, but at least they were doing something to the best of their abilities. While Robin Singh’s presence hadn’t really improved our fielding standards, bowling coach Venkatesh Prasad was reported to have done an outstanding job with the seamers on the England and Australian tours. Anyway, both were summarily dismissed and the board sat on its backside waiting to do something.
Now, nature abhors a vacuum, so the cricket board known to function in mysterious ways appointed Chicago born US minor league baseball player and till recently Australian fielding coach as India’s fielding consultant for the ongoing one day and T 20 20 series against Sri Lanka. Young had earlier coached the Australian baseball team as well.
Both Prasad and Singh were sacked before the seven match one day series against Australia. India played the three Tests against Lanka without the services of a bowling and fielding coach. Players like Mohd Kaif and Yuvraj were natural athletes and hence excellent fielders square off the wicket. Virat Kohli and Suresh Raina have shown in their fledgling careers that they too are good fielders.
Others like Tendulkar have manfully kept up the intensity despite the vagaries of advancing age. With Yuvraj’s knee and back constantly proving a problem, one has lately seen him patrolling the boundary. As a race Indians are unfit and this doesn’t help us at all. Fitness brings agility. So, Indians have to constantly work on their fitness. Someone like Dhoni is a good example of being fit. The amount of singles that he runs in practically all his innings in Indian conditions proves that he is fit. Seldom does he cramp up. It is imperative to remain fit primarily because the amount of cricket that our top players are playing will result in breakdowns sooner than later. I cannot for instance for the life of me understand how our bowlers lose their pace. When Munaf Patel appeared on the scene, he was a tearaway quick. Ditto for Ishant Sharma. But both have lost their pace. Is It a surfeit of cricket or is it listlessness due to the incessant regimen that one needs to put in to remain on top of one’s game? It is nice to see Ashish Nehra bowling quick again, but at the moment he has no clue which length to bowl to Sri Lankan batters Dilshan and Sangakarra.
Javagal Srinath is a classic example of reinventing himself. Realising that he needed to shoulder the Indian bowling workload, he went to a bio mechanist and converted from a vegan to a non vegetarian to build his body mass. There was a flutter in the dovecotes when Manoj Prabhakar described Venkatesh Prasad as a baggage handler and not a bowling coach. Indian quicks like Kapil Dev and Srinath learnt quickly that one needed to bowl a back of the length on Indian wickets. Maybe that is why they were successful. The game has changed with the onset of the T 20 version. Batters are looking at dominating the bowling from the start. There is no switching off once the power play is over. The bowlers are in the firing line. So, they need to readjust, no one can allow the batsman to get underneath the ball, so that he can simply smash it out of sight. In England recently one saw Stuart Broad bowling from round the wicket and making the ball slant away from the batsman, even as the batsman threw his hands at the ball unsuccessfully. The angle defied a stroke. It was a good tactic, some thought had gone into it. I don’t know whether Ottis Gibson (England bowling coach) was responsible for this move, but it was a change. It is now more obvious than ever that the quicker you bowl along with the wrong length, the faster you will sail over the boundary. Using the pace of the ball has become a reality for batters.
A technical flaw for a batsman can be ironed out. And this has been known to happen even with some of the best. Sunny Gavaskar and Rahul Dravid are perfect examples of this. Form deserts even the greatest, this is when flaws creep into the game. It could be a shuffle as it happened with Gavaskar or the bat may no longer be coming down from the perpendicular, but from the slips leaving an opening between the bat and pad. But great players like the two mentioned managed to clean out these glitches by consulting people who they thought were specialists. Gary Kirsten and Paddy Upton seem to be doing a good job as far as the mental side of the game is concerned. They have convinced Dhoni’s men that they can be world beaters. They have convinced them that they can win abroad. Maybe that is why our record is improving abroad. But fielding and coaching are specialist tasks.
If you don’t get the right candidates and they don’t hit it off with the players, it can be an unmitigated disaster. You don’t want to fool around with a bowler’s action or a batsman’s technique, but you need somebody to tone up the drills, make the fielding unit cohesive and improve its catching and ground fielding. It is the same with bowling, the kind of lengths to bowl against specific batsman, the tactics to use against an opponent. India at the moment is clueless about the Lankans. It simply doesn’t know what to bowl to Dilshan and Sangakarra. So, they end up bowling rubbish.
Scientifc and medical expertise are equally important in this age of frenetic cricket. Performance plans and player development strategies are valuable inputs as well. I am not advocating the kind of support staff that say John Buchanan had for Kolkata Knight Riders which bordered on a Mom and Pop shop or the one that England are using at the moment. The latest addition to team director Andy Flower’s burgeoning staff is Graham Gooch as batting coach. The top tier of the English coachinjg staff led by Andy Flower sets the ECB back by a shocking one million pounds sterling. Since Flower won the Ashes for England, the ECB probably reckons that it is money well spent.
But Indian cricket needs professional and quality inputs on the fielding and bowling front. It might have to cough up big bucks in the process. But it is the need of the hour. The maladroit and clumsy fielding has been the butt of jokes this season. Not catching anything in the air is mutating faster than the H1N1 virus. To remain firmly entrenched at the top of the cricketing pyramid requires a punishing fitness regimen and no short cuts as far as performance levels are concerned. Sustaining the intensity is crucial in contemporary sport. The board needs to realise that quick fix solutions will not work. They need to assess the shortcomings and take decisions. Young’s temporary appointment may well be in that direction. But one needs to give people time to adjust and only then will they be able to deliver results. The Young experience at the moment doesn’t seem to be benefiting our cricketers, they seem to have gone from bad to worse.
