India’s quicks brought up to speed
In 1987, Ravi Mammen, the managing director of the Madras Rubber Factory, was a frustrated cricket fan.
He looked enviously at the quick bowlers that other nations possessed, and dreamt of India having a formidable stock of their own. Mammen wanted ‘‘to give the same medicine back to the English and Australian batsmen that India received’’, recalls TA Sekhar, a former fast bowler for India.
So, Mammen founded the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai, the first such establishment in India, and got Sekhar to be chief coach.
The caricature of the Indian fast bowler was not really of a fast bowler at all: instead, it was of a genteel medium-pacer swinging the new ball, a footnote in matches defined by spin. Often, India did not even pick their best pace bowlers. In place of specialist quicks, selectors preferred ‘‘some other fast bowler who can bat a bit’’, Sekhar says. ‘‘The guy getting picked would have been a bits-and-pieces player.’’
Such thinking had its own selfjustifying logic: if seamers did not get wickets, it made a certain sense to select multi-faceted cricketers to perform the role. Or simply no fast bowlers at all. Sunil Gavaskar opened the bowling in test matches five times in a career that included just a solitary wicket to go with his 10,000 test runs. There was even an old trope that suggested genetics meant India could not produce pace bowlers in the way that Pakistan could.
The pivotal figure in shattering this myth was Kapil Dev. Aged 15, the story goes, Kapil complained about the small size of lunch portions provided at a junior camp and was told: ‘‘There are no fast bowlers in India.’’ Luckily, Kapil could bat, too, smoothing his elevation to international cricket. He was not merely a great cricketer, but one who dismantled an idea that held Indian cricket back. In 1980, two years after his test debut but 48 years after India’s test start, Kapil became the first Indian quick to reach 100 test wickets; by the time he was done, he had 434, surpassing any test cricketer that had gone before him.
‘‘He showed that Indians could also produce fast bowlers,’’ Sekhar says. Kapil’s excellence meant that young Indians now had a fast bowler as a role model.
The creation of the MRF Pace Foundation marked an equally profound shift: expertise, and cutting-edge technology, focused unreservedly on producing elite pace bowlers. The foundation enlisted Dennis Lillee as director.
Lillee spent about 40 days a year in Chennai, and shaped a new rigour that India brought to the pursuit of excellence. When Lillee arrived at the foundation for the first time, in September 1987, Sekhar recalls, ‘‘He said, ‘I want a running coach, I want a dietitian, I want a swimming pool and I want practice wickets which will be very similar to Australia. I want to do video analysis of the bowlers’. This was all new to India.’’ Lillee, and the foundation, got them all.
Mammen died of a heart attack in 1990, aged 39, but his family ensured that the foundation remained committed to his vision. So far, 17 Indian test bowlers have trained there; the intake today are directed by Glenn McGrath.
The Board of Control for Cricket in India long had an uneasy relationship with the foundation, and did not form an official partnership with it until 2014. But, long before, it learned that its focus upon fitness, sports science and video analysis could improve young quick bowlers throughout India. In 2000, the National Cricket Academy was created.
The professionalisation of Indian cricket, at all levels, has galvanised older quicks as well as new ones. ‘‘We have become so much fitter,’’ Ishant Sharma explained recently of the transformation of team culture over his 11 years. Sharma averaged 38.81 until 2014, but, after his ‘‘five-fer’’ at Edgbaston, 29.14 since. It was he, also, who crushed England the last time the countries met at Lord’s in 2014 with some ruthless short-pitched bowling.
The Indian Premier League has also abetted Indian pace bowling. For all that the skills required are profoundly different to tests, the IPL has brought leading fast bowlers and coaches from around the world to India, creating a network for young quicks to learn from. India is now at the epicentre of forward thinking in fast bowling.