Coaching class: From great to greater
How India coach Ravi Shastri unlocked a young team’s true potential post the pandemic lockdown
AHMEDABAD: “Have a drink on my name. I’ll have nimbu paani or milk and honey, but you enjoy a drink, yaar. At my expense. I can take a laugh,” said Ravi Shastri, a sly smile spreading on the face of India’s coach, while finally addressing the elephant in the (dressing) room—the presence of those memes that flood the internet after every India match, all of them insinuating a love for the bottle.
The smile left his face before he finished his answer; one that best captured the essence of Shastri’s complex personality in a line. “Enjoy karo na yaar, kya
farak padta hai (Have fun, what difference does it make?). As long as the team does well, I’m happy.”
Despite being the coach of the best-ranked Test team in the past—as India once again became No.1 after their 3-1 series win over England—Shastri hasn’t always received the respect a man in that position deserves. For, nobody quite divides opinion in the world of cricket like he does. This is perhaps because Shastri is not a backroom man as coaches of the Indian cricket team have tended to be. It could also be because the former India all-rounder turned former BCCI commentator turned former team director turned current India coach has meant different things to different people. As colourful as each of those avatars have been, at the core of them all has always resided a man who has the best interests of Indian cricket at heart.
That palpable love has manifested in different ways. For people from 58-year-old Shastri’s generation, he will always be the cricketer who squeezed out every last and bitter drop of his finite potential for a greater cause. For those who grew up on a diet of television cricket in the late 1990s and 2000s, Shastri was not just the commentator with a propensity for bombastic catchphrases (“flaaaaashed and flashed hard”) but also one who never shied away from using his influence to stand up for Team India. This spectrum ranges from storming a Mike Denness press conference in South Africa and demanding answers on behalf of the six players he had punished to accusing Nasser Hussain of being jealous of BCCI’s riches in a studio in England.
The social media generation, as the memes should suggest, find him amusing. But about 30 boys and men from the same era, now part of the inner and peripheral spheres of Indian cricket, think of Shastri as their greatest mentor. The leader of that group, Virat Kohli, has gone on record to say that Shastri is like his older brother—“Ravi
bhai” is what he and the gang call him. So, Shastri repaid their affection and trust by shaping them into just the best team in the world, possibly even the best pool of players India has ever had—the kind that produces miracle-causing debutants and match-winning youngsters with great frequency.
All of that, immediately after the longest break seen by professional cricketers due to the coronavirus lockdown, and within the space of a few intense months spent inside stringent bio-bubbles. “I said to the boys on the first day of hard lockdown in Australia, ‘with adversity comes opportunity’,” Shastri said at the press conference on Sunday.
“I told them cricket has never seen anything like this since the second World War and ‘so what you guys are going through is unreal but you have no choice, so leave everything aside and focus on the game’.”
Mindgames
Unlike Shastri—who had spent most of the lockdown in 2020 in his farmhouse in Alibaug—the players arrived in Australia after having first been cooped up in their apartments, and later in the bio-bubbles of IPL in the UAE. Shastri realised this and immediately decided that he was going to be more lenient on the boys than he would otherwise be.
“You had to be patient, more than anything else,” said Shastri. “We started with two losses in the one-dayers in Australia. Normally, you can go straight to the point and address it with the individual and tell him, ‘pull up your socks’. But I had made up my mind, very early on with my team management, to show empathy. Because for six months a lot of the guys had not got out of their flats… that’s not easy.”
Not that he wasn’t strict when needed, especially with the precocious talent of Rishabh Pant. When Pant arrived in Australia in late November last year, he had just finished a mediocre season of IPL that led to him being dropped from the ODI and T20I series in Australia. What more, he was overweight. “Yes, after the IPL, he came (to Australia) with a lot of baggage, which showed in his size,” said Shastri. “He had to work his backside off to lose that baggage, which he did. And I tell you, he has trained harder than anyone else in the last two months.”
It is common knowledge that Kohli had had a similar conversation with himself after taking a look in the mirror in 2013. Shastri held that mirror out for Pant, and the result is not just the match-turning knocks of Sydney, Brisbane and Ahmedabad, but also a marked improvement in his agility behind the stumps.
“What he’s done in the last two months, winning those matches for India, there are players who have never done it in a lifetime,” Shastri gushed. “At the age of 23 to pull off magic, as he has done, was because he was told in no uncertain terms that this game demands respect. He addressed that and is now reaping the rewards.”
Problem of plenty
The biggest reward for the Indian think-tank involves a problem of plenty. The Test pool now has two perfectly able wicketkeepers, on either side of the stumps, in Pant and Wriddhiman Saha. Just as they have two match-winning left-arm spinners in Ravindra Jadeja and Axar Patel, who took 27 wickets in just three matches from his debut Test series against England. Then, there are two offspinning all-rounders in R Ashwin and Washington Sundar, who has solved the all-rounder issue since he made his debut in Brisbane.
The same could be said about the openers—Rohit Sharma, Shubman Gill, Mayank Agarwal and Prithvi Shaw—and of course about India’s greatest battery of pacers as well that are one too many to name, led by Jasprit Bumrah and rounded up by one Test (and miracle) old T Natarajan. The reason for this explosion of talent, believes Shastri, is the bio-bubble, or the several bubbles the Indian players have quarantined and resided in since the game restarted last year.
“Because of the bubble, you had to go (to places) with large squads. Normally you take 17-18 players, but because of the quarantine laws that exist, we had to go with 25 to 30 players. And 35 in certain cases,” said Shastri. “And as luck would have it, we were left with no choice but to play all of them.”
As was the case in Australia, certainly, where the Test series ended in Brisbane with only two regular first-team players in Cheteshwar Pujara and stand-in captain Ajinkya Rahane featuring in the eleven for the Brisbane Test. “Because of that, we found out who is good and who is not good.”
There weren’t too many of the latter, but plenty of the former. “It’s worked out well,” he said. “Six months ago, you would never have imagined that as many players would play for India. Would Natarajan or Washington Sundar have played a Test otherwise? No way. Circumstances have made it happen and I’m glad for that.”
It hasn’t been all teaching and sermons for Shastri; he claims to have imbibed as much as the players—if not more—during his multiple stints now as India’s coach. “The amount I have learnt in these six years, I hadn’t learnt in the last 35 years that I have been associated with the game,” he said in Hindi. “When I was given this role, I didn’t understand the end-game. Now I know man-management is the most important thing. What’s as important is to understand human behaviour—how someone reacts to failure and success, when to talk to someone and when to leave them alone.”
At least on three occasions in the press conference Shastri referred to the side as “my Indian team”. It perhaps is too, as he has been at the helm with captain Kohli, right through this unique transformation of a great team getting even greater. That journey of his—especially over the last few months when India has twice turned Test series’ around against Australia and England now—may one day be toasted over some of the finest champagne. But for now it is strictly nimbu paani, with a variation of milk and honey.
We deserve to be in the final. Now it’s about getting together again and focusing on one big game which is quite exciting for us.