Multi-dimensional players are now a necessity, not a luxury

Often potentially valuable second skills tend to get ignored, or under-worked, with the kind of schedules players have...cricket is ripe for such specialised second skills coaching.

Cricket continues to prove, as it has for a while now, that teams need multi-skilled players. That can sometimes be interpreted to mean bits and pieces players. It can be a fatal misinterpretation. Those players have rarely made a contribution to one-day cricket. Instead, what I am suggesting are players who have substantial skills in one area of the game, good enough to earn them a place for that alone, but who then contribute significantly in another area. Ricky Ponting with his fielding is an example, so is Sehwag with his off-breaks.

Very often such potentially valuable second skills tend to get ignored, or under-worked. With the kind of schedules players have these days, it is tempting to train your primary skill and if fielding is the second skill, then do a bit more work there. The time to do develop another skill is, I suspect, when a particular player has a break or while the others might be playing another version. Clearly you need a dedicated facility for this and luckily, India now has a very nice one in Bangalore with a fine coach and support staff. The National Cricket Academy under Dave Whatmore could, additionally, develop a specialised skills programme; a custom made programme for specific cricketers.

Let me give you an example. India are playing Yusuf Pathan at No 7 and really, the only reason they can play him is they are a fairly complete side with ten players. And Pathan is no more than a three or four overs bowler at this level since he doesn’t really rip his off-breaks. However if he could become a better off-spinner, then he would provide greater variety to his captain and make a stronger case for his inclusion in the side. Now, when the rest of the team is playing a test match, which he is currently not required to play, he could spend a week at the academy with a coach who will work on his off-breaks, show him newer skills and he could practice them for as long as he wanted. Then, armed with this knowledge he could bowl better in the nets and thereafter, in crunch situations for his team.

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Someone like Robin Uthappa, for example, who has done a fair bit of wicket keeping as a young man could, likewise, spend a week there training with a wicket-keeper and developing a second skill. He would, probably, never be picked as a second wicket-keeper but in case he was in the side and the regular man went down, the team would have someone to turn to. For Uthappa, it is the opportunity to provide a better basket of skills to the selectors and the captain.

I’d recommend we go further and hold a batting camp for bowlers. We all know what happens during the nets. The batsman bat and the bowlers bowl and when the time comes for the bowlers to get a hit, the batsmen are fooling around with the ball and dishing up the kind of stuff that will never be bowled in a match. And so the bowlers, already inadequate with the bat, never get to improve. They don’t need to average 20 with the bat, but hang around and make ten or fifteen and help thirty or forty get added to the team score. At one level, people like Munaf Patel and Ishant Sharma need to learn, at another people like Piyush Chawla, who can bat, can aim towards becoming all-rounders.

This development of a second skill has long been practiced by good companies who, for example, get excellent software engineers to learn communication skills which will come in handy later on in their careers. I believe cricket is ripe for such specialised second skills coaching. It might have been a hindrance all along when the academy didn’t have either the desire or the manpower to do anything significant. Now, we can and this will go a long way in producing more rounded cricketers. If India seek to dominate world cricket, it needs to produce cricketers who can do more.

The climate is right at the moment, India has a fairly young side that if nurtured could dominate world cricket. A second skill must be mandatory and the NCA can become a pivotal resource in ensuring that. This is a wonderful phase and it comes rarely. This is the time to be innovative, to arm our talent better.