India vs Australia: Before Indian challenge, desert dorm for Australia

But the UAE leg-spinner, who along with teammate Muhammad Qasim had been called in as net bowler, still wasn’t prepared for what he saw upon his arrival on the third afternoon. The nets had been taken down. And there they were, the Australian team, dragging out plastic chairs under the hot Dubai sun to the centre of the ICC Academy Oval before placing them at where the short-leg and silly-point would stand for a spinner. It wasn’t just Haider who was left bemused. It took even the academy ground-staff a while and some strong words with the Australian management to finally allow chairs being placed on their square.

It’s an image, however, that came back to Haider last week as he sat watching the final day of the Ranchi Test between India and Australia on TV. As Shaun Marsh and Peter Handscomb stood firm on a crumbling pitch and saved the day to keep the series alive, it all started making sense to him. For, this is exactly the dire scenario that he had seen the Aussies prepare for, even if it was in a way that left him scratching his head. The only difference being, the plastic chairs here had been replaced by KL Rahul and Cheteshwar Pujara at the close-in positions.

“It wasn’t just a case of you were out if the ball touched any of the chairs on the full. You then had to go sit outside with your pads on and wait your turn to come back in once everyone else was done. It was basically to teach them that in India, you get to commit only one mistake. After that, you’ll have to sit outside for the rest of the day or spend the next three days on the field,” recalls Haider.

“It was a game of patience that was being taught to them the tough way. And like they’ve shown so far in India, and especially in that third Test, it’s working,” he adds.

Nathan Lyon practises at the academy during the Australian team’s stint in Dubai before the tour of India.

Unlike Haider, who’s played domestic cricket back in Lahore with the likes of Ahmed Shehzad and Umar Akmal and isn’t new to bowling at top-quality opposition, Qasim is still a promising UAE batsman who can bowl handy off-spin. And he reveals having been surprised when coach Dougie Brown, the former England and Scotland seamer, took him to the Aussie nets. While clearly overwhelmed at the prospect of meeting and bowling to the likes of David Warner and Steve Smith, Qasim was to soon comprehend that it was the Aussie contingent that was benefiting more from his presence there than the other way around. Qasim, who originally hails from Sialkot, recalls having been given a clear directive: get our batsmen out.

“Sriram, Australia’s spin consultant, was the one giving us instructions. To the left-handers, I was asked to largely target the stumps and their pads, and it was outside the off-stump on the generous rough for the right-handers. Every two overs, Sriram would ask me to change angles and come over or around the wicket,” says Qasim. But he does recall having bowled Shaun Marsh and Glenn Maxwell and then being cheered by the Aussie camp.

“They weren’t making it easy for each other. If a batsman made a mistake or played a loose shot, everyone else would tease them and laugh with us. There was a lot of banter till they got their act right,” Haider chips in.

***

THE ICC Academy located at Dubai Sports City is like the cricketing version of the Holodeck—that fascinating virtual reality platform on Star Trek which could evoke any scenery or scenario and would be used by the crew for tactical training. For here you’ll not only find state-of-the-art training and fitness facilities, indoor and outdoor practice nets and two floodlit ovals; but an assortment of 38 pitches that come in various flavours, mainly Asian but also WACA, Gabba and English.

And somehow it just seems right that they should be located in Dubai, a city renowned for its artificial islands and canals.

To the extent that every year a number of county teams land up at the Academy for their pre-season camps in February and March because ironically the four “English” pitches in Dubai are more English than the ones they’ll find back home at this time of the year. And as Will Kitchen, the Academy director, reveals already over the last couple of weeks Alastair Cook has scored a century for Essex against Middlesex while James Anderson has made a successful recovery from his latest injury with Lancashire.

The five counties—who are now competing in the Emirates T20 tournament—are sharing the facilities presently with the Papua New Guinea national team as well as 22 coaches from around the world for a level 2 licensing programme.

The old cliché has it that if you stand long enough at New York’s Times Square you’ll see every nationality walk by. From what Kitchen says, the Academy might well be the Times Square of world cricket with several cricketing nations having camped here at some point. Last year around 42 international and professional teams made their way through here, and they included West Indies who spent five-and-a-half weeks here preparing for their eventual crowning as World T20 champions for a second time.

“We are still only three months into 2017, but already 29 teams have come and trained here,” says Kitchen.

Those 29, of course, involved a first-timer in the Australian national team, who had only ever used the facilities here during the Test against Pakistan in October 2014. But they didn’t just land up in Dubai with the mere intention of getting acclimatized to Asian conditions and going through the motions. Like Toby Lumsden, the Melbourne-based head curator at the Academy who’s just commenced his second stint here, puts it, they had very specific plans along with some “special” demands.

Kevin Pietersen, now a renegade, is a regular at the academy.

Lumsden is used to accommodating requests from touring parties, and like he says, “most of them including the English ask for classical Asian pitches with some turn but nothing too exciting.” But what Australia had in mind and subsequently were provided, even if Lumsden was only pleased with it at a professional level, were pitches that he describes as “disgraceful” and “lacklustre”.

“I’ve never seen a team ask for that kind of pitches. But this was a special request from an international team and a one-off so we just went through with it. That’s what the Academy was built for,” he says.

It meant that Lumsden and his staff had to apply different techniques to ensure the Aussies got their tailor-made, debauched pitches. They had to rough up the batting lengths and stop watering the pitch before using a light roller to ensure that the dry pitch crumbles. That wasn’t all. The dust-bowl also needed to have enough rough areas where the fast bowlers would land outside the off-stump for both left and right handers.

“We put down some dry dirt or clay. So they are like really worn foot-holes. We made them half an inch deep and put dry clay. So when a spinner pitches the ball there, there’s considerable turn,” reveals Lumsden.

The Australian, who started off making pitches for Shane Warne at the Junction Oval in St Kilda and twice came close to taking over at the MCG, does admit that while Australian bowling coach David Saker—an old confidant—did appreciate the wickets that had been provided to the visitors both in the nets and for centre practice, the curator wasn’t personally chuffed about it. The hectic nine-month schedule of non-stop cricket at the Academy grounds means that every pitch is in circulation once in six weeks, which ensures that they are worn out by the time the season ends in around May.

“When we scuff up a wicket and remove all the grass like this it takes a whole season to regenerate the grass. It would have been a real struggle if the Aussies had come calling at the start or during the middle of our season since we didn’t have to rotate those wickets now,” he says.

Lumsden remained a tad sceptical about what the Aussies had made him do to his wickets till the time he saw Stephen O’Keefe run through India in the first Test at Pune on a pitch that was later deemed as being “poor” by the ICC.

“Pitches aside, I’ve never seen a team come here with such technical plans. Any touring team benefitting from what they’re trying to achieve here and to get results is always a good feeling. That’s the vision that Rod Marsh had promoted when he was in-charge here during my first stint,” says Lumsden.

***

HAIDER and Qasim too were flabbergasted the first time they saw the pitches that they would have to bowl on. In the leggie’s words, “aisa lag raha tha ki isko haath hi nahi lagaya hai.” But while Smith, Warner and even the senior Marsh were names that they had come to idolize, some of the younger members of the team were still alien to them.

Haider recalls being alarmed when he saw Matt Renshaw pad up and walk out to bat. For, minutes ago he had mistaken the fresh-faced Queensland opener to be a coach’s son or a U-19 player who had just wandered into the arena.

“But here was this extremely young-looking boy padded up and ready to face me. The first two balls I just tossed up gently because I wasn’t sure how he’ll cope with it, and he drove on both occasions powerfully past me. He then ended up showing the best defensive technique among all of them. And I thought this boy could actually score runs in India,” he says.

Handscomb is the one Qasim found the most difficult to bowl to, and he puts it down to the right-hander’s use of the crease and ability to disturb the rhythm of the spinner. Most of the talk between the Australian coaching staff and their batsmen, the two Emiratis recall, were about not focusing on the pitch or the rough patches but simply the ball and keeping it out safely.

“Handscomb did it the best in my opinion,” says Haider, “His initial movements in his stance reminded me of Ijaz Ahmed but his bat comes straight like Shivnarine Chanderpaul and he plays spin like an Asian batsman. He uses his feet a lot, but also gets a lot of runs square of the wicket.”

Maxwell was another batsman who spent a lot of time with the two spinners. Haider too, much to the leg-spinner’s surprise. Otherwise, he had been made to bowl a lot at the left-handers who tried playing the sweep off him while batting without a front-pad. But Maxwell, who would then go on to score a maiden Test ton at Ranchi, would insist on Haider coming along every time he stepped in to the nets.

“I wondered why he was doing so considering we knew India weren’t going to play a leg-spinner in their playing XI. But it was my trajectory that they were getting used to, and he practised the reverse-sweep for hours, even if he didn’t connect too often,” says Haider.

“It’s not like they didn’t practise shots. But they were only off loose balls. They knew that however horrid this pitch was the Test one had to be at least slightly better and they would need to score runs and not just defend,” Qasim adds.

The Australians have reiterated the benefits of their Dubai sojourn on various occasions since landing in India. But most of it has been about their batsmen getting used to playing long hours in the heat of the Asia and also their defensive play. But the UAE spinners and Lumsden also talk about the hours put in by the Aussie spinners and the poignant plans that they were working on.

The Australians had contacted Kitchen and his team about their plans for holding a pre-tour camp in Dubai well before Christmas. And one of their requests had been for SG Test balls, the types that they would be encountering in India.

While the batsmen seemed to get used to facing the SG with its proud seam, especially the openers who had Haider and Qasim come at them with the new-ball, not all the spinners were comfortable with it.

“O’Keefe was a worry for them. He was hardly getting any wickets in practice matches or even troubling the batsmen. In addition, he was struggling for control, and dishing out many full-tosses and loose deliveries. I really feared for him, and was sure the Indians would punish him,” says Haider,

“And he takes six wickets in each innings!” he adds with a chuckle.

***IT’S THE English who were the first to recognize and acknowledge the importance of Dubai as the perfect transit stop in lieu of preparing for a tour to the subcontinent. They were here in 2012 when Andy Flower, the then head coach, is known to have even replicated crowd sounds and those of close-in fielders to get his players used to dealing with India’s ambient ruckus. Like Lumsden says though, “drier” and “dustier” were their only add-ons in that order with regards to pitches. The ECB have had a lengthy ongoing dialogue with the Academy which means even their Lions and junior teams are regular visitors to Dubai. It’s like they never land in India before having stuck their feet in the sand of Dubai. Even their U-19 team had indulged in a week-long camp before embarking on a tour of India a couple of months earlier. Other teams like New Zealand and West Indies too have spent time here, though it’s the Associates who make more annual visits to these parts. Indian cricket though has largely kept a distance from the UAE landscape though most of the IPL teams practised at the Academy during the 2014 IPL.

But according to Kitchen, the Academy no longer caters to only teams. There’s a new breed of visitor to these parts, more of the freelance variety. There are T20 leagues sprouting all across the world and the number of cricketers representing themselves is burgeoning by the day. And the Academy could soon become somewhat of a high-profile AirBnB pit-stop for weary travellers of the cricket world as they crisscross the globe to ply their trade in the various leagues.

Kitchen says that former England captain Kevin Pietersen has already pioneered that movement and is a routine visitor at the Academy.

“KP comes a lot. He will drop by when he’s on his way for a tournament. He will come hit a few balls for two or three days. He likes it here. Generally, for now we have more young professionals trying to establish themselves rather than well-known ones so far. We have one young English pacer who’s just out of the professional system for now trying to make his way back in,” says Kitchen.

“We don’t advertise it at that level for professionals. It’s more organic. It’s the same for everyone from a local cricketer to Virat Kohli if he ever wants to come on his own,” the director explains. So it’s basically like how you book your local football rink—inquire about availability and then book it for a fee that Kitchen insists isn’t substantial. It seems only a matter of time then before the likes of Dwayne Bravo and Chris Gayle start dropping in for a quick swing and pummel.

Haider and Qasim though like the rest of the UAE team have the luxury of calling the Academy their home, considering this is pretty much their base. And though neither got the chance to rub shoulders with Pietersen during his visits, they are still soaking in the experience of having not just bowled to the likes of Smith and Warner but in a way having influenced their unexpected success on Indian soil. They both agree on not having seen off the Aussies with any great confidence.

“Getting used to the ball here and the pitches is one thing. But when they left I still thought they would have little chance against Ashwin and Jadeja the way they were bowling,” says Haider.

But little did they realize then that they would end up playing anonymous but not less vital roles in Australia presently still holding hopes of retaining the Border-Gavaskar Trophy.

Qasim sums it up best when he says, “The last day they called us over and thanked us for our help. Even they didn’t seem that confident of doing as well as they have. And to think unke jeet mein hamara haath hai.”