Young Indian cricketers at KIOC
Young Indian cricketers at KIOC

A group of keen young cricketers at Karnataka Institute of Cricket during our visit in May 2018

As an Aussie fan and general cricket lover I was enthralled watching the first Test between Australia and India at the Adelaide Oval.

Leading into the series, it shaped up to be an intriguing and potentially close Test series. Australia, although missing their two best and most experienced batters, are playing at home which is a massive advantage. Winning away from home is one of the hardest things for any nation to do, especially for India when they come to Australia and vice versa. Up against the world’s number 1 ranked Test side, under the leadership by a man who is almost unstoppable in recent years. The Aussies are trying to rebuild and win respect both on and off the field while India will never get a better chance to beat Australia in Australia.

The first Test didn’t disappoint! The contest see-sawed in the first few days before India took control of the match. While Australia regularly had hope on a very exciting final day, India eventually won by 31 runs.

PUJARA JUST LOVES BATTING

In my opinion, the difference between the two sides was Pujara’s first innings hundred. It was an exceptional display of Test match batting with his 123 (off 246 balls) the major contribution in India’s first innings of 250. Not content with that significant innings, his appetite for runs and to bat for long periods was on show again in the second innings as he batted for another 204 balls for his 71 before finally being dismissed by a bowler for the first time in the match.

Now having played 65 Test matches, the “veteran” Pujara has now scored 16 Test centuries, 3 of which he turned into double hundreds. He has a knack of turning starts into ‘daddy hundreds’ as England’s former batting coach, Graham Gooch described them. Pujara has scored the most double centuries in first-class cricket ever by an Indian batsman (12) with two of them being triple centuries scored for his state Saurashtra in the Ranji trophy – India’s first-class competition.

Having spent time in India earlier in the year, Pujara’s innings’ in the first Test and a deeper look at his first-class career doesn’t surprise me. I got my first taste of cricket in India and how much they really love the game when I spent 10 days as a guest coach at the Karnataka Institute of Cricket (KIOC), in Bangalore in May this year.  What stood out for me during my time in there was the passion and love of the game and how many hours, the young cricketers tirelessly worked at honing their skills.

INDIA’S NEXT PUJARA?

At the conclusion of day 4 of the Test, with India in a commanding position, I received the following photo from Irfan Sait, who is the Director and Founder of KOIC.

Sweeping – although it was my downfall in my debut, it’s a good scoring option against an accurate spinner

Irfan is a proud mentor of his cricketers and regularly sends me screenshots of the boys and girls in his academy that have had success. This particular photo stood out to me for a couple of reasons. The first was that I know the boy in the photo, Shivam M B, from spending time with him during the visit. KIOC has around 1,500 students attend their summer camps, who are part of the 2,500 players that regularly attend, and while I did meet a lot of them when I was at KIOC I spent some time with 13 year old Shivam and was amazed at some of his numbers (you can view our meeting in May in this episode of my vlog – 7:36min). The second thing that stood out was that it was his 32nd century. 32 centuries at the age of 13!!

Reverse the numbers of his age (31) and you get my age and having played a fair bit of cricket myself, I reckon I’d only just have him covered for centuries in my whole life (juniors, school, junior rep, grade, league cricket etc). Imagine how many centuries he’s going to have under his belt by the time he’s 21 and pushing for state or national selection.

Now for all you “doubters and sceptics” reading this, let me note here that I can’t vouch for the standard that he’s playing all the time. He does play representative cricket and is playing above his age group so I’m sure most of the time it’s decent but regardless a 100 is a 100 and as the famous saying goes, “you’ve still got to get em”. Run scoring is a habit and when you learn how to score big runs you can do it over and over again.

The other factor that must be noted when putting Shivam’s centuries in context is the number of matches he plays. When I asked Irfan to give me some more context he couldn’t tell me the exact number of matches but he said he would play in excess of 75 matches a year. These matches are a combination of T20’s, 50 over, two and even three day matches but predominantly 50 over matches.

AUSTRALIAN JUNIORS

Let’s compare that to some of the best young players that I mentor here in Perth.

Teague (who turned 14 in April) and Douwtjie (who turned 14 in June) are both in the Western Australian Under 15 squad. They are two of the best young batters that I coach/ mentor and I’m very excited about what’s possible for them in the future. Yet between them in all levels of cricket they’ve scored 3 centuries. Both are playing Under 15s and 4th grade for their district clubs and are having good seasons.

In Under 15s, Teague has scored 273 runs in 5 innings at an average of 91 in under 15s with three half-centuries. In 4th grade he has scored two half centuries in 4 innings with a highest score of 65 not out.

In Under 15s, Douwtjie has scored 215 runs in 6 innings at an average of 35.83 with 2 half centuries. In 4th grade Douwtjie has scored 2 half-centuries in 7 innings with a highest-score of 82.

They have one more district match before the Christmas break and have both played in 8 other matches outside of district cricket (school, rep trial games etc.). They will both also play three 50 over matches before Christmas in the state Under 15 talent carnival where the squad will be selected for the national carnival in February 2019. So at roughly the halfway stage of the Australia season, Teague would have had had 20 innings and Douwtjie 23 innings. Looking at their fixtures after the Christmas break, there is another seven under 15s matches and seven 4th grade matches (not including finals). Providing they get into the state squad (let’s assume they do) they will play three scratch matches leading into the tournament then six matches at the tournament in February. Throw in another five or so school games (they said that’s the absolute max they’d play) and it totals 28 matches after Christmas. There are three finals for under 15s and three for 4th grade so presuming both those sides make it to the grand final, there’s another 6 games. Adding it all together the absolute maximum number of games they will play 57 matches. In reality they are more likely to play somewhere in the mid to high forties

This number has actually surprised me as I thought it would be less than that but about 7 or 8 of them are practice matches. They both also go to schools that have a cricket program and are in the state system so play a fair bit more cricket than most other kids in Perth. I can’t comment on what other state’s are like but assume it would be similar but either way it’s still a considerable amount less than the number of matches that Shivam plays in India.

Another reason that Douwtjie and Teague’s number of matches is high is because they are playing two matches on a Saturday (Under 15s in the morning and 4th grade in the afternoon). As they progress up the grades (I’d expect them both to be playing second grade by the end of the season) they won’t be able to play Under 15s as well, which will cut out a significant amount of their matches.

Getting back to Shivam, there’s no doubt that he is a very good young player and I’m sure there’s many other 13 year old boys and girls all around India who are doing great things like Shivam. However it wasn’t his level of skill that stood out for me. He wasn’t head and shoulders better than Teague or Douwtjie or any of the young batters I work with in Perth. What stood out for me was his work ethic and amount of practice and playing he did.

Let me paint the picture of Shivam’s work ethic a little more for you. When I was at KIOC in May, it was the summer school holidays. This meant that there were matches on almost every day. Shivam was regularly the captain of his team and his team bus would leave KIOC at around 9:00am to go to where they were playing that day. They would play a 50 over a side match and the bus would return them to KIOC around 5:30pm. Nothing too different to what a young kid in Australia would do.

What was different was what Shivam would do before and after the matches. He would get to KIOC a few hours before the bus was due to depart and begin practicing with his mates. It was never too structured but always competitive. After a couple of hours in the nets he’d go off with his team for the match. Once the match was finished and the bus had returned to KIOC, regardless whether he’d scored runs or missed out, Shivam would do the 7:00-9:30pm training session under lights that was for KIOC’s better cricketers.

I’m not suggesting this is what everyone needs to do. In fact it’s probably not healthy for most people. But Shivam knows no other way and is happy when he’s got a bat in his hands and when I see Pujara’s two innings in Adelaide and his level of concentration, I have a better understanding of how he’s able to do it.

Under 19s 

Although it was a close first Test, the current gap between India and Australia is sizeable. India are ranked 1st in Tests, 2nd in ODI’s & 2nd in T20I’s while Australia are ranked 5th in Tests, 6th in ODI’s & 4th in T20I’s. According to my good mate, Chris ‘Buck’ Rogers the gap is even bigger at Under 19 level. Buck was coach of the Australian team at the Under 19 World Cup in New Zealand in January this year, which the Indian team won. He was so impressed by them and told me afterwards that they were miles ahead of everyone else. Buck made a point of telling me how further advanced both the Indian boys understanding of the game and level of skill was ahead of Aussie boys and every other country.

India has a population of 1.34 billion people (according to Google) compared to Australia’s 24.6 million, hence giving them many, many more people to choose from. However, the competition is much more fierce and conditions often nowhere near as good for many of them. It takes a desire and level of commitment like nowhere else to make it to the top.

Again, after spending my short period of time in India and having lived between Australia and the UK my whole life I’m not surprised by this at all…

THE MIDDLE IS THE BEST PLACE TO LEARN

Any good cricketer or coach will tell you that the best place to learn is out in the middle. Scoring big runs is an art form. There are so many elements that you have to get right to consistently score big runs. Firstly you have to get through the start of your innings. Then you have to know how to build an innings. You have to know when to attack and when to defend. You have to be able to handle pace and spin. You have to be able to switch on and switch off. And that’s just a few of the things needed to score big runs. As I mentioned previously, run scoring is a habit and scoring big runs is a habit that young Indian batters are learning at a young age and becoming very good at as they progress through the ranks.

I would encourage any young aspiring cricketer reading this, no matter where in the world you live, to play as much cricket as you can. Challenge yourself in as many conditions and circumstances as possible. The other positive of playing all the time is that you don’t put as much emphasis on one particular innings which means you don’t put yourself under as much pressure to succeed every time you walk to the crease. This allows you to play with more freedom which, combined with the experience you gain from playing regularly, is where your success lies.

While Australia and other countries are struggling to find long term successful Test batsman, I have no doubt that India will continue to do so for a long time yet! Maybe Shivam M B will be one of them one day and do it on Australian soil just as Pujara has done. 

Tom Scollay batting for Middlesex

About the writer: I founded Cricket Mentoring in August 2016 with the goal of helping cricketers all over the world become the best they can be – on and off the field. As a former professional cricketer with Middlesex CCC (2010-2012) I’ve played with and against some of the world’s best players and worked with some elite coaches. I’m a Cricket Australia Level 2 coach and through my own personal experiences, practice and a hunger to always learn, I’ve developed and continue to refine my principles and philosophies on the great game. I believe there’s 6 pillars to peak performance (Technical, Tactical, Mental, Emotional, Physical, Lifestyle) and most athletes only focus on one or a few things. All of our content (articles, videos, podcast) covers the 6 pillars and has been created to assist cricketers understand what it takes to achieve great things in the game.

CHECK OUT MY VLOG

Do you want an insight into the life of a player/ coach/ someone plugging away to get better every day? Check out my Vlog (Video Blog) where I take you behind the scenes of Cricket Mentoring and my life. See me train, play & coach plus a whole lot more… It is raw and real as I aim to help you with your own game in a fun and interesting way. [Bonus: Get access to the insights of International players]

About the author : Tom Scollay

2 Comments

  1. Nandeep Singh June 18, 2019 at 5:14 am - Reply

    There is no doubt that India had provided the best batsmen to world.

  2. shuffleboard pucks September 2, 2019 at 8:34 am - Reply

    I think that there is a lot of quality in India

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Chris 'Bucky' Rogers batting for Somerset in one of his 554 First-class innings

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I once spoke to a former professional player who became a coach in the professional ranks and asked him whether he would change his technique during the season during his playing career. He responded in the negative.

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About the writer: Chris 'Bucky' Rogers isn't your typical cricketer. Having toiled away in First-class cricket for over 15 years, he was finally rewarded for years of dominance opening the batting in both Australia & England with selection in the Australian Test team for the 2013 Ashes in England. He went on to play 25 Test matches for Australia where he scored 2,015 runs @ 42.87 including 5 x 100s. With the amazing First-class record of 25,470 runs & 76 centuries, he has now retired from playing and transitioned into coaching, where he currently is the batting coach for Somerset CCC. 

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He said working on technique is for preseason and once he started playing, all that mattered was watching the ball.

That, I’ve discovered, is a very traditional response, handed down from father to son.

I had to stop myself from groaning out loud. “How short-sighted” I wanted to reply. I’m sure he’s not alone and these days, coaches are reluctant to challenge technical issues in young players, preferring the students to figure it out themselves. Perhaps they fear intervention will only create more problems.

NO PRE-SEASON?

What if a player never has a pre-season as, like me, he plays continuously on both sides of the world, where the seasons overlap?

Just once did I have a pre-season in Australia – and that I remember mostly for the agony of running the sand-hills at City Beach in Perth, rather than any working on technique.

Instead I was chasing an endless summer by playing 12 months of the year in England as well as home. “What is a pre-season?” was my standard jibe at teammates.

That meant technical experimentation had to be done on the job – so the standard answer to not work on your game for six months of the year seems like a waste of time and opportunity to me.

Often as a young batsman, you’ll have days when you pick up a bat and it feels like it is a natural extension of your body and other days when it feels like you’re hefting around a railway sleeper.

DAYS WHEN THINGS WEREN'T WORKING

Numerous days in grade cricket and even opening the batting for Western Australia, my swing would feel so awkward I would be trying to adjust almost every ball. I might try picking the bat up higher in my swing, other times move my hands forward in my stance and even change the width of my stance. These were just a very few of many.

In fact what would really confuse me is, somehow I’d last until the lunch break feeling like I couldn’t hit one off the square and then come out after a 40 minute sit down and feel like I was Brian Lara … well not quite but you get the drift.

What it taught me though was to keep trying to get better. I would often think to myself, and now sprout this to every kid possible, one step back to go two steps forward. Working with my dad who was my coach, I’d try all sorts of technical changes and usually, after a while, something would click and it would all fall into place. It would be like hitting at a brick wall and then all of a sudden one thing works and the rest fall over like dominoes.

PROBLEM SOLVING - DON'T GET OUT THE SAME WAY

One of the great advantages of playing in four innings matches is the chance to problem solve as a batsman between the first and second innings. I disliked … no, I hated getting out the same way or to the same bowler in the second innings as I did in the first.

After getting out I would sit down and figure out a way to combat the bowler who dismissed me first time around. It might not have just been a mental change but quite possibly a technical one.

Stuart Clark once dismissed me for a duck with a perfect ball that pitched on off stump line and nipped away but instead of just accepting he’d bowled me a jaffa, I checked out the footage and saw my hands were not coming down straight in my swing pattern and caused everything - my hands and bat - to go towards mid on. So my bat actually was inside the line, hence the ball found my outside edge.

Second innings, my focus was trying to get my hands to go towards mid-off while playing with the inside half of my bat to counter the away movement. Yes I know this is a bit more than ‘Batting 101’ but I only started to understand my own batting by constantly tinkering – even to the extent of working out what doesn’t work, to find out what does.

PLAYING TO COACHING

As I moved from player to become a coach, a surprise first-up piece of advice from other coaches was to be careful about the level of input you try to pass on. Yes, that makes sense and it would be ignorant to not listen to advice from people who have spent a long time coaching. However, it will need to be balanced against my long-held belief that the best players in the world never stop seeking improvement.

My first club-coaching role came via former Australian player and teammate Bob Quiney to help out at his beloved St Kilda Cricket Club, where the players have an average age younger than ever and a thirst for learning.

I was wary of saying too much early, but when one player said, “I’ll do whatever you tell me to do Buck”, my tinkering instincts took over.

“One step back to go two steps forward”, I reasoned.

The first player asked me how to play slow medium pace bowlers as he had nicked off to one the previous Saturday. I told him to be positive and proactive. Walk at the bowler or walk into his line … a la Steve Smith … and whip him through the leg side if the bowler went for the stumps. The next Saturday he was in the same position and ended up, he said, with too much going through his mind and being neither proactive nor defensive. He nicked off again. But he had learnt from his mistake and knew what he’d do the next time and since has had some success.

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 Bucky passing on some knowledge during a batting masterclass for Cricket Mentoring in Perth

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INDOOR NETS SYNDROME

Another had what I call ‘indoor nets syndrome’ and had developed a swing where he just jabbed at balls that would race off his bat on the true synthetic surface, but had difficulty with the natural variation of turf wickets. His hands would go towards the leg side in his swing but the ball would slice to cover or more likely the slips. I was wary of trying to reshape his whole swing but then thought “Why not?” I’ll show him what I think works and he can figure the end result out for himself”. He was quite difficult to adjust and we even experimented with grip changes, not something I’d usually recommend.

After an hour’s work he was starting to get the basic principles and enjoying it. He had a far better understanding of a swing after trying something new and that can only benefit him. He can always go back to what he was doing but at least he’d tinkered and thought about it. Afterwards he seemed genuinely excited at the change and the understanding.

Yet there have been plenty of times where my coaching hasn’t worked. I tried to help Peter Siddle with his batting but made it worse. Eventually he figured a few things out himself and is still getting better – so maybe my “one-step-backwards” theory helped!

CHANGE TAKES TIME

With most things, change takes time to feel natural and this principle needs to be stressed and I’m wary of trying to change players into playing like me but sometimes certain things need to be tried.  I’m amazed when I see any tall player stand with his feet close together in his stance when Kevin Pietersen is ‘Example A’ of how to succeed as a tall batsman.

I firmly believe all the best players in the world are tinkerers and never stop trying to improve. Just ask Marcus Trescothick, who at age 41 was still telling everyone how he’s trying to fix things. That and his saying that ‘form hides in mysterious places’ were my two favourite things I got from him.

At the moment the county season has just started and he’s still working on his game plan against different kind of bowling. You’d think he’d have it all sorted by now but no, he’s using every opportunity to improve as we all should.

SUCCEEDING AT THE AGE OF 38

When asking me to write this article, Scolls (Tom Scollay) asked that I write a little about my own journey and how I managed to play well in the 2015 Ashes at age 38.

Like Trescothick, I had a thirst for perfection. Grit and determination was only a part of it. So many years of 12-months-playing of four-day cricket meant I had a very good understanding of my own game, with all its strengths and weaknesses, and to have some success against James Anderson, Stuart Broad, Mark Wood and Steve Finn in bowler-friendly conditions was only possible with an in depth, intimate knowledge of my swing and my game.

For different bowlers and conditions, I would have different triggers. On the wickets that provided more bounce and seam I would have a back and across trigger while at other times, particularly against Anderson’s swing, I would push forward to try and cover the movement.

This skill only comes from trial and error and experimentation and willingness to learn. If every time I tried something, had initial failure and not persevered, my game would have been very one dimensional and limited.

Growing up I often watched in awe some of the bigger kids who seemed to make batting look easy but then fell away when they had to play against adults who matched them in size and strength. I believe it was because these kids had got it so easy early on, that they hadn’t learned to work at their game to try to understand it better.

ALL THE BEST ARE ALWAYS CHASING IMPROVEMENT

Of course, there are plenty of examples to disprove the mould but of all the best batsmen I have seen, the one consistent attribute they possess is a desire to never be satisfied and to chase improvement.

They tinker to learn … and then comes improvement.

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