SPORTS

The Indian cricket team coach saga is over! It’s Ravi Shastri now! After months of deliberation and media hype and controversy , the Cricket Administrative Council consisting of stalwarts like Sachin Tendulkar, Saurav Ganguy and VVS Laxman have finally zeroed upon the straight talking , practical and an imposing brother figure Ravi Shastri as the Coach of the Indian Cricket Team uptil 2019 World Cup. Even as his name reportedly faced opposition from Dada Saurav Ganguly, it was Ravi who finally made it after the presentations of Tom Moody, Richard Pybus, Virendra Sehwag, Lalchand Rajput were heard and it was later whispered that the presentations of Moody and Ravi Shastri were close to neck in neck competition but Ravi finally got the nod as he has the approval of Indian cricket Team Captain Virat Kohli who had serious differences with the last coach Anil Kumble who was said to be a strict disciplinarian and overbearing.

 

Virat played with Ravi Shastri when he was the Director of Indian Cricket.Their performances were excellent and that might be the reason that Ravi Shastri found favor as the new Indian Cricket Team Coach. His man management skills are said to be excellent and he allows the players to have their way of enjoying their evenings provided they come to the field for practice and matches fresh as daisies and raring to go and ready to give their 100% to their team and their individual performances. He is also said to have guided many batsmen and bowlers to hone their art and become better cricketers. Ravi also convinced BCCI to give him his support team in bowling coach Bharat Arun, assistant coach in Sanjay Bangar and fielding coach in R.Sridhar.

However, this has left a bad taste in the mouth because the CAC and Saurav Ganguly had already appointed Rahul Dravid and Zaheer Khan as batting and bowling coaches respectively for 150 days. So what is exactly their role now? Are they consultants or will they be in any other capacity? Many veteran cricketers feel it was not handled well and hence was a grave insult to senior and respected cricketers like Dravid and Zaheer. But Shastri clarifies that Arun knows these boys better than he does. “Fifteen years of his life, he has been coaching. You look at that track record, which is outstanding. Right from junior level to A team to Indian junior World Cup teams, he has been a part of them. He knows these boys better than I do because he has been in the system for the last 15 years. You look at the last World Cup, where India took 77 out of 80 wickets, If Bharat Arun’s name was someone else who has played a lot of Test cricket, you would have put him on top of the tree. So, I don’t need to elaborate too much on what he is good at, or what are his strengths. It is there for everyone to see”.

“Fifteen years of his life, he has been coaching. You look at that track record, which is outstanding. Right from junior level to A team to Indian junior World Cup teams, he has been a part of them.”

But now everything seems to have settled and Ravi Shastri has got the coveted job for a hefty fee of eight crores. He adds that he has matured immensely in the last two weeks during the coach-appointment process.”Mine will be a refresh button that will be pushed. I carry on from where I had left. I don’t come with any baggage”.The team has done exceedingly well over three years and they are the people who deserve more than anybody else. Ravi Shastris, Anil Kumbles etc will come and go but the fabric of Indian cricket will remain and the credit should go to everyone who has participated in this Indian team over the last three years. If they are No. 1 today [in Tests], it is the efforts that they have put in over that three-year period and they deserve the credit. People like us will come and go. India enjoyed considerable success under both Shastri as team director and Kumble as coach. During Kumble’s one-year reign, India won series in West Indies, and at home against New Zealand, England, Bangladesh and Australia, losing only one of 17 Test matches along the way.

Under Shastri, whose earlier tenure as team director lasted almost two years, India made it to the semi-finals of successive global events – the 2015 World Cup and the 2016 World T 20, and also won their first limited-overs bilateral series in Australia, whitewashing the hosts 3-0 in T20’s. In his second coming, Shastri will work more with his core team – Sanjay Bangar (assistant coach), Bharat Arun (bowling coach) and R Sridhar (fielding coach) – from his previous stint. Shastri said his job was to make the player focus on his game “without a care in the world for anything outside”. When you play the game, you want your mind clear, he said. “You want to be able to focus inwards without a care in the world for anything outside. That happens with good communication with the support staff. My job is to do exactly that with every player – to put him in a frame of mind where he is thinking only about his role and he is thinking about the team he is playing for and, of course, the opposition which we always respect. And that’s his job, period”, he says.

But what does the dashing captain Virat Kohli think of this arrangement? Captain Virat Kohli felt that working with a coaching staff the team was familiar with meant everybody knew what to expect from one another. “We have worked together for three years – 2014, 2015 and 2016 – so that amount of understanding is bound to be there,Since we have worked together in the past, we know what’s expected and what’s going to be on the plate and what’s worked for us in the past.I think understanding and communication is something that works in every walk of life. The changing-room environment is nothing different. You need to have all those aspects for any relationship to work in life. It’s not just confined to cricket. We follow the same rules of life that are followed everywhere else. I don’t see anything different that can be elaborated upon this. Everyone has gone through experience of relationships somewhere or the other in their lives. The same rules apply here”.
Asked if there was extra pressure to perform since he now had a familiar coaching staff, Kohli replied in the negative and said he shut out external factors. I don’t think there is any added pressure because what has to happen will happen, I believe in that, regardless of what happens around on the outside world,” he said. As a team, we aspire to achieve what we want to achieve. Every one of us has faced hardships in the past. Criticism and being criticized is nothing new, so we understand that aspect of playing sport as well. I only have the bat in hand and my job is to go out there on the field and control what’s being done on the field. And, that’s something that I have focused on in the past couple of months, and I continue to do so. A lot of speculation and lot of things fly around and those things are not in my control.

“As I said, my job is to go out there on the field and try to bring the best out of this team along with the management and try to perform to the best of my abilities which I believe in. I only started off as a player and I wanted to do the best for the team. And, I continue to take up this responsibility and will continue to do so in the future years, till I am the captain or I am kept at this position. That’s what I see of it. I mean you only have to look at the series you are going to play ahead of you. If you focus only on these external factors, it’s very similar to you going out to bat and thinking what if I get out. It can happen in any scenario, so you just need to take care of your mindset and move forward.On hindsight one does wonder what the picture might have been if an Aussie coach like Tom Moody would have been selected as the coach. There is a school of thought that foreign coaches are not meant for India but after the superlative performances of John Wright and Gary Kirsten, one does feel that a rank outsider could have managed the team well and the team could have played as one unit. But that is water under the bridge. Now it’s up-to Ravi Shastri and his boys to win accolades for the country and they should bring back the World Cup in 2019!

RAVI SHASTRI’S HONEST COMMENTS ON DHONI AND YUVRAJ
After many speculations, the Indian team has got a new coach in the form of Ravi Shastri, who says that the Indian cricket team can become the best test team of the country in the coming years on the strength of its strong fast bowling attack. Replying to a question on Dhoni and Yuvraj’s World Cup 2019 World Cup, he said that there is still a long time left for the 2019 World Cup and added that there is no doubt that Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Yuvraj Singh are champion players and once again the team is going to be part of the India dressing room. He said that to understand the situation, Captain Kohli and the team need to spend time. Dhoni’s performance was just fine but Yuvraj Singh was out of form. After the Champions Trophy, Yuvraj’s bat remained silent in West Indies too. In such a situation, now it is necessary to see if the classmates give them a chance ahead or not.