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Gatorade Pacers kicks off today

Special Correspondent

— Photo: Sandeep Saxena

TALENT HUNTERS: T.A. Sekar with Javagal Srinath during the launch of Gatorade Pacers 2008 in New Delhi.

NEW DELHI: The ‘Gatorade Pacers 2008’, the talent hunt for pace bowlers, will start off with its first phase of selection in Hyderabad on Friday. It will go through with the process in six more cities by January 13 before selecting a dozen bowlers for specialised training at the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai.

At the launch of its second edition here on Thursday, the Chief Coach at the MRF Foundation, T.A. Sekar, said that looking back they had done a “great job” last year when three bowlers were picked for training. He said this year, apart from visiting seven cities, compared to four in 2007, the selectors would also be looking at the junior talent already in the State teams before finalising the candidates to receive training at the Foundation including under Dennis Lillee.

Sekar said that it was a great initiative by PepsiCo and the synergy between Gatorade and MRF should augur well for Indian cricket.

Former India pace bowler Javagal Srinath, a former trainee at the MRF Foundation and now one of its coaches, said that Twenty20 had put a scare into the budding fast bowlers, for, getting hit for 15 or 20 runs an over was not a “pretty sight to watch”. He said that the Gatorade project would attempt to nullify the threat of pacers getting discouraged by T20 at the grassroots level and at the same time attempt to build fast bowlers for the T20 competitions.

Online registration

Srinath said that the project would be “penetrating” 1000 schools and “look at 4000 kids” during its selection process. Selections would be done in Chennai, Mumbai, Jamshedpur, Kolkata, Delhi and Bangalore, apart from Hyderabad. Online registration could be done at www.gatorade.co.in or www.cricinfo.com/gatoradepacers.

Two of the selected bowlers from last year’s batch of three, Abhishek Singh and Ravikant Sharma, the latter already a Ranji Trophy player for Rajasthan, were present at Thursday’s function. The third, P.K. Dharma, was playing for the Tamil Nadu under-17 team and could not make it.

Srinath termed the Gatorade project a “fabulous initiative” which was not exactly a roadmap to get into the Indian team but an effort to provide the right direction.

Sekar talked about how trainees at the Foundation were being groomed to become better bowlers, not necessarily in terms of speed. He said that today’s game was based on fitness and “we play a crucial part in it”.

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