An insider’s recollection

Sometime in 2018–19, Sunil Gavaskar told me, ‘Sri, this is the second-best Indian fielding team in my involvement with the sport.’

I was curious to know which side he rated the best, but I couldn’t quite muster up the courage to ask him, so I merely smiled and replied, ‘Thank you, Sunny bhai.’

With his trademark mischievous smile, he asked, ‘You don’t want to know which was the best?’ Without waiting for my reply, he continued, ‘The team of the 1980s. That was a better fielding unit than this, and I am not joking. Look at the guys we had. Mohammad Azharuddin had just come in in the mid-1980s. We had Sadanand Viswanath behind the stumps. There was young blood in the form of Laxman Sivaramakrishnan and Chetan Sharma, and then we had Kapil Dev, Roger Binny and Madan Lal. It was a top fielding unit, very consistent. The way Azhar used to cover the boundaries, the way he used the angles, was excellent. And Kapil’s throws were something else.’

As Sunny bhai walked away and I reflected on what he had said, the phrase that stuck with me was ‘very consistent’. The 1980s was a great fielding team because the difference between their good days and their bad days was miniscule. If on a good day, the team’s productivity rating is 99 per cent, then on a bad day, you should be 96 per cent. It shouldn’t be that you are 99 per cent on your returns on a good day and 80 per cent on a bad day. That, to me, is not a good fielding team, and that is what we drove into the Indian team during my seven-year stint.

It was after the advent of live television and white-ball cricket in the 1970s that fielding started to assume a certain significance worldwide. Until then, it was considered, at best, a necessary evil. The general perception was that there were only two skills in cricket—batting and bowling. We all knew Eknath Solkar was a great catcher and Sir Garfield ‘Garry’ Sobers was brilliant in the field, but there was limited to no footage. When Kerry Packer arrived with his World Series Cricket, players started to view fielding as a third skill. No longer were fielders clapping a good shot and fetching the ball from the boundary. They started to chase the ball, a little bit of effort was being made.

In my opinion, the 1990s brought a fourth skill into cricket— fitness, which changed the entire dynamics of the sport. South Africa and Bob Woolmer, their coach, were the first to hire strength and conditioning coaches on their return to international cricket in 1991. South Africa were unbelievable at the time, and much of it was to do with how much fitter their players were compared to the rest of the field. That opened everyone’s eyes to the significance of fitness, and our great sport has never been the same again.

The last push India required in our quest to become a consistent global superpower came in the form of the IPL. Fitness was revolutionized, along with a lot of other things. The BCCI started investing heavily at the grassroots level. There were better grounds for our kids to start diving without the fear of getting injured. The IPL became the best coach, television became the best coach, in my opinion. Kids learn more from watching television these days than they do from a coach, as far-fetched as that might seem.

Of course, the putting in motion of plans will take time to fructify. The IPL started in 2008, and with the BCCI ploughing the money back into improving infrastructure in Tier 2 and Tier 3 cities, you could see the transformation unfolding before your eyes. In five years, since the commencement of the IPL, India would vie for the title of the best fielding team in the world.

It was during the 2008–09 season that the fielding framework was established at the NCA. Robin Singh was travelling with the national side as the fielding coach, and the BCCI felt the need to have a full-fledged coach at the academy as well. I believe the addition of the first full-time head of the fielding unit at the NCA was a step in the right direction, and not because I was the one appointed to that position. And once the IPL started, there was a huge mental shift, a paradigm shift in the way young players looked at fielding.

Before that, India were consistent without being outstanding. The 2003 World Cup unit was a top-class fielding side. India were passable in 2007. If you take the 2011 World Cup, it was such an experienced team. I was supposed to go to Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh for a women’s camp when Gary Kirsten approached me, asking me if I could assist the World Cup team during their three-week preparatory camp in Bengaluru. It was too big an opportunity for me to pass up the Indian coach’s offer.

Although that was an unbelievable team, it was as if they left fielding almost to choice—the choice of the player concerned. It’s not that they never used to work on their fielding, but it wasn’t their top priority by any stretch of the imagination. I used to set up all these stations at the M. Chinnaswamy Stadium, the nets were outside the main stadium, at the NCA. The lone guy who used to turn up consistently every day for fielding was Ashwin, sometimes accompanied by S. Sreesanth. Only on a couple of days did we have team fielding sessions, where we split the squad into three different groups and did some drills. Other than that, although they held their own and especially in the final against Sri Lanka, that team was a World Cup winner purely on experience. That’s my assessment only so far as fielding is concerned. They knew what they were capable of physically, they knew they couldn’t turn up every day and have half-hour fielding sessions. They were aware their bodies couldn’t take that workload leading into the World Cup. And they also knew that they could turn it on when needed. This team was an exception to the rule of thumb based purely on the collective experience among them as a unit.

Even a year before we came on board in 2014, India had a top fielding side at the 2013 International Cricket Council (ICC) Champions Trophy. It was a youthful team—Jadeja, a young Rohit, a young Virat. The way they fielded set a benchmark as to how good a white-ball fielding group India were. There was an opportunity there for us to become one of the most consistent fielding units in the world. India were easily the best fielding team in the tournament; we were a gun team. The fielders considered themselves an attacking tool rather than thinking they were just there to save runs. That was a huge mental shift.

The players knew everyone was watching on television. They knew they could create a piece of magic whenever the ball came to them. They were looking for opportunities—that was the kind of team culture. It’s something that must have been spoken about by the management. There must have been a conscious effort to make this happen because they all had the skill sets. MS wasn’t obsessed with the results, but he never compromised on effort on the field.

When I joined the team, one of the first things I asked the skipper was what he wanted of me; if there were specific areas he would like to see addressed. MS was on the massage table at the Marriott in Bristol, and I had carried a list with me of 25 players or so. I read out the names to him and he had some observation or the other about most of them. When I reached Ashwin’s name, MS said, ‘Can you work on his agility? I want him to be quick in changing directions.

(Excerpted with permission from R Sridhar’s Coaching Beyond; published by Rupa Publications)