COACHING BEYOND: My Days with the Indian Cricket Team by R. Sridhar & R. Kaushik

Author:R. Sridhar & R. Kaushik [Sridhar, R. & Kaushik, R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rupa Publications
Published: 2023-01-05T00:00:00+00:00

The word ‘coach’ is an interesting one. What is coaching? Where did ‘coach’ come from? The way I look at it, it came from ‘carriage’. Whether it is a railway coach or the carriage of a horse, it takes you from one place to another. The sports coach takes you from one place to another, be it in your career or your life. That journey could be from the age of eight to 35, or it could be a period of three years, or it could just be six months.

The job of a coach is to take the player from one place to a better place. The other job of a coach is to make a player think he is better than he is. There is a nice quote in our coaching forum: ‘A good coach is one who makes the player think great about him. A great coach is one who makes a player think great about himself.’

Most of the time as coaches, we make the mistake of wanting to go there and impress the player and make them think, ‘Arre yeh achcha coach hai (He is a good coach).’ In the ideal concept of coaching, of which man-management is a massive part, one must make a player think highly about himself.

That day, Bumrah went back thinking highly of himself. He knew that on a flat track on a hot day after three-and-a-half Test matches, he could hurry the likes of Marsh, Labuschagne and Travis Head, or whoever for that matter.

A coach has to wear many hats; you have to keep changing them like a circus clown. You have to juggle hats. But obviously, one of the key roles of a coach at this level is man-management.

Arun or I don’t have to teach Bumrah how to bowl a yorker. Arun has set it up in such a way in the last few years that Bumrah can deliver a yorker whenever he wants to. So, you don’t teach them to play cricket any more; instead, you teach them subtle things. Obviously, when you go a few levels down (at the junior levels), it is different.

Each guy is different. We just spoke about Bumrah—extreme pride, extreme sensitivity. Mohammed Shami is totally at the other end of the spectrum. Don’t get me wrong; it is not that he is not proud or he is insensitive. It’s just that he is bindaas, with the devil-may-care attitude.

We were in South Africa in early 2018, for the first Test in Cape Town. Within half an hour of the start of the game, Bhuvi reduced them to 12 for three, dismissing Dean Elgar, Aiden Markram and Hashim Amla. Then we bowled like millionaires, and they ended up making 286. That evening, Ravi summoned the pace attack (Bhuvi, Shami, Bumrah and Hardik) and thundered, ‘What’s this rubbish? I have seen so much driving in the middle that I am sick of it. From this point on, whatever driving happens must be only on the road. No bloody half-volleys, get stuck into them.

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