Sport

Fitness of mediumpacers is a worry for India

The national selection committee deferred the selection for the Australian tour by a few days to give some chance to unfit mediumpacers. How they expected unfit players to become fit in a few days is a question only they may have an answer to. So our national team’s bowling resources are looking disastrous at the moment. We do not have fast bowlers. Our bowlers are all mediumpacers. And none of the main mediumpacers apart from Irfan Pathan is fit at the moment. That is a fact, and if Vengsarkar and company ignore it, India will get the drubbing against Australia that Pakistan is getting against India.

Fitness of Indian mediumpacers was always a worrying factor during the days when the bowlers didn’t get proper guidance about how to maintain the fitness level. But with foreign physios with the Indian team, the fitness of mediumpacers ought to have improved. There is not even one Indian international mediumpacer who has played for six months without breaking down.

The problem Indian mediumpacers face is that there are no biomechanical analysis facilities in India to work on the fitness. Dr. Anant Joshi has been mentioning to the BCCI that we have to have these laboratories at the zonal level if not at the National Cricket Academy which is totally defunct for seven months of the year.

A few years back, a tall bowler was referred to me when I was with the KSCA in Bangalore. When I got him to bowl in a friendly game in May, I invited Vengsarkar, the then Chairman of the TRDW, and Pravin Amre, the then chairman of the junior national selection committee, to have a look at him. Impressed by the pace the boy generated, they picked him for the NCA Under-17 camp though he hadn’t played for the State and later sent him to the MRF camp. Dennis Lillee too was impressed and the boy accompanied him to the Australian Institute of Sports, Canberra to get a biomechanical analysis.

The biomechanical analysis report clearly mentioned the strengths and the weaknesses of the boy. He was asked to work on the weaknesses in the gymnasium. Without working on the areas that he was told to under the guidance of the trained physio, the boy decided to do workouts himself in a private gymnasium. Within a year, he was out of cricket.

Ashish Nehra too has been intermittently in need of a physio’s attention. Balaji is still struggling. What is intriguing is that Zaheer Khan, Sreesanth and Munaf Patel are all from the MRF Pace Foundation, and yet with all the expertise that the foundation provides them under the guidance of Dennis Lillee and T.A. Sekar, these bowlers are not fit when the Indian team needs them.

There are a minimum of 75 mediumpacers playing Ranji Trophy every season. Talking to them, one gets the impression that at many places the State associations, despite receiving adequate subsidies from the BCCI, have not been providing training facilities to the bowlers. There are no trained trainers, and no good physio is available to the associations on the meagre remunerations that are offered to them.

A physio from Baroda Dr. Nitin Patel is with the English and Wales Cricket Board. He specialises in the rehabilitations of the fast bowlers.

Why can’t the BCCI get him back to work on the Indian mediumpacers when he has expressed willingness to sort out the problems? The experiment of getting foreign physios to work on the Indian players has failed. It’s not that they are not experts in their field. But if the bowlers are not fit to play, the BCCI will have to look for the solutions.

Gary Kirsten and Dav Whatmore are not magicians. They can only get fit players to perform. Whenever the bowlers have been fit, Indians have always done well. Australia is a tough tour. The bowling coach Venkatesh Prasad has to be consulted when the mediumpacers for the tour are picked. It is pointless sending unfit bowlers on the tour and expecting them to get fit.

There are good young mediumpacers on the domestic scene. Picking them is the solution.

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