THE DESERT PITCH

AS the sun peeped out over the edge of a thorny jungle near Jaipur, a bunch of peacocks watching warily from a distance, no horns, no traffic, no fans, no TV cameras, the tall Australian started to shuffle his feet. Slowly, the arms went up, then a leg, and as his new 8220;team8221; gathered around him, its most colourful face, Gagandeep Singh, son of a dhaba owner from Alwar, turned on the volume of the car stereo8212;Aa ja nach le.
It8217;s passing-out day for Greg Chappell, in a way. And, after that tense, rock-climbing session, it8217;s passing-out day, for real, for his first batch of trainees at the Future Cricket Academy in Rajasthan.
8220;I have never seen that happen in a cricket camp before. It was a spontaneous expression of joy. And this, for me, is the most positive feedback I can hope for at this stage. Over the last two weeks, these kids have had a blast, and so have I,8221; says Chappell, the familiar deadpan mask slipping, just for a few seconds.
So, what is the former Australian captain, legendary cricketer, former coach of a superstar Indian team doing in the foothills of the Aravalli ranges, dancing like a Punjabi possessed? Well, six months after that noisy exit from Mumbai, seven months after his two-year national coaching stint got buried under the rubble of India8217;s disastrous World Cup campaign, the 59-year-old from Sydney has started living again.
He is now the central figure in a multi-crore rupee mega coaching project that8217;s fast taking shape in Jaipur, driven by the Indian cricket board8217;s marketing whiz and its Vice-President Lalit Modi, funded largely by the Future Group of Pantaloon and Big Bazaar.
Packaged tactfully as a 8220;training programme8221; for Rajasthan cricket, the actual three-year blueprint of what8217;s going to happen here is simply breathtaking, even for Chappell:
30-room global academy building at the Sawai Man Singh Stadium
24 practice pitches with different surfaces, including cement, five indoor pitches
e-library at the basement to be set up by IBM
Monitor in every room where trainees can access their day8217;s footage
Cameras that will map every inch of the facility and ultimately hook up to the Internet, enabling parents to track their kids from anywhere in the worldAnd the works: swimming pool, sauna, gym, a separate cricket ring for simulated matches, and an obstacle course
Not surprisingly, in just two weeks since they began, the first call has already come from a business group in Australia which wants to replicate the model for an international sporting facility. 8220;We have got a call from another state in India, too,8221; says Chappell.
But then, the real story behind the 8220;bricks and mortar stuff8221; is Chappell himself. And the logo that he has worked out for the programme8212;the Ashok chakra, with the words 8216;Movement8217; on top and 8216;Change8217; below.
8220;Movement needs change. The Ashok chakra is about movement and change, it8217;s the centre of your national flag. It8217;s perfectly apt for the flag, it8217;s perfectly apt for what we are trying to do here. We need these kids to move on, move forward, and to do that, you need change. That8217;s what the wheel is about,8221; he says, unusually animated now, his hands cutting huge arcs in the air, inside his office at the stadium, amidst a pile of practice cones, plastic ropes, cricket bats, bastketballs, stumps, posters and CDs.
Movement and change8212;it8217;s perfectly apt for Chappell, too, especially after those tumultuous two years that ended with reports of a team split down the middle, serious differences with top stars, a visit to a Mumbai hospital for a stress check, and on to the airport.
Movement? 8220;I have been through periods of introspection, acceptance. The acceptance that for anything you are involved in, you are responsible for what happened. You had a part to play in that. You can8217;t divorce yourself from that. Again, in any relationship breakdown, nobody is right 100 per cent, and nobody is wrong 100 per cent. There were things that happened where I thought we did well, there were things that happened where we didn8217;t do as well as we could have. I can certainly say that about myself. I have dealt with it, and now I look forward.8221;
And change? 8220;When I look back on my cricket career, my best lessons came from the toughest experiences. Failure was where you learnt the best lessons from. Good days don8217;t teach you as much as the bad days. A lot of the focus now is on what happened at the World Cup, but there were another 20 months before that when we were involved in Indian cricket, and much of it was very successful8212;first series win in the West Indies in 35 years, first ever Test match win in South Africa, world record chase in one-day cricket. Ten new players came in at that time, many of whom went on to play in the winning Twenty20 World Cup team. You can8217;t ignore those things either.8221;
Well. About a month after he boarded that plane from Mumbai, Chappell got a call from Modi, who also heads the Rajasthan Cricket Association, to remind him of an old visit. 8220;When we came here for the Champions Trophy last November, he showed us the facilities that were coming up. He was very proud of them, but I asked him, 8216;Well, you8217;ve got the bricks and mortar stuff. Now what are you going to put in them?8217;8221;
8220;Around May, he spoke to me about a full-time commitment. But I was not willing to give that because I had some other commitments. Besides, I didn8217;t want a full-time commitment in cricket, in India or anywhere else. I wanted to be doing a few different things at the same time. What I suggested was a combination; Ian Frazer who had assisted Chappell during the India stint and I could manage the programme over three years, which we believed would be ideal for the academy. Ian would be here for six months every year on a day-to-day basis, and I would be in and out regularly. It sort of went back and forth, and things started moving in August. By mid-September, we had the details worked out, but we didn8217;t actually sign the contract till this week.8221;
Chappell and Frazer landed in Jaipur on September 29, armed with a basic curriculum framework for the target group of cricketers aged 16-19 years, which emphasised on a few key concepts: developing functional strength, training in match situations, coping with failure early, and building athletes who can adapt to any form of the game, Twenty20 to Test cricket, 8220;not body builders8221;.
And that explains the rock-climbing party, and yes, the cooking session last Friday. 8220;They got some basic ingredients, like the bat and ball in cricket, and the recipe which really is the strategy. The challenge was to try and put it all together to come up with the best combination. The idea here is to drill in the message through simple activities that you do in your daily life, not through books.
8220;Hours and hours in the gym is not the answer. Many of these guys don8217;t have access to gyms anyway when they return home from here. What we are looking for is functional strength, strength in the long muscles of the body, in the forearm, back, thighs8212;as opposed to short muscles that you get in the gym. We don8217;t want bowlers who are muscled up in the shoulders, we want them to open their chest out, who are stronger in the back rather than in the front. You look at someone like Kapil Dev, long, lean athlete, that8217;s what you need.
8220;So the sort of training that the Indian Army does, the sort of training that young boxers or wrestlers or gymnasts do, that8217;s the sort of training cricketers should be doing, young cricketers in particular. That8217;s where we are heading here.8221;
Bit of an overload, perhaps, considering that only a handful of his first batch of 20 has completed formal school education? But then, that8217;s why these concepts are translated into simple take-home exercises. 8220;Once they understand the basic postures, it is as easy as washing the cows back home, or the car, or cycling to school,8221; says Chappell.
And that8217;s also why the routines here include wrapping the cricket ball in a sock, hanging it from the ceiling, and hitting it first on the front foot, then the back. And again, why you have this wrist-strengthening exercise where you tie one end of a rope around the middle of a stick and the other around a brick8212;you have to roll up the brick by rolling the stick with both hands, and down again.
Besides, Chappell this time has a set of five local coaches taking turns to translate and ensure that the message gets through8212;though trainees do get away with the odd retort. The wrist exercise had Rohit Rathee, a tall, fumbling fast bowler from Ganganagar, muttering, again and again, 8220;Baap re, mar gaye.8221;
But yes, they are enjoying every bit of it8212;frog jumps with the boxing coach in the adjacent state facility in the same compound, gymnastics, wrestling. Says Tanveer-ul-Haq, the son of a tailor from Dholpur: 8220;In the wrestling hall, their coach playfully asked Chappell sir to wrestle with him for 30 seconds. He replied, 8216;Ok, I will do that if you play my game for 30 seconds. And in cricket, there8217;s always a toss, and I have won it, so you bat first against my pace bowlers8217;. That shut him up.8221;
Chappell says, after Team India, coaching boys from the outposts of Rajasthan has been an education for him, too.

8220;I think a lot of the future stars of Indian cricket are going to come from the outlying districts, the villages. These guys have the hunger and the reason to succeed. If you have grown up in relative comfort in the metros, why would you want to make that sacrifice, leave your family, leave your friends, change your whole lifestyle to pursue a cricket career? The question is: emotionally, do they want to undergo the privation of taking themselves away from their support structures, put themselves under the pressure of being hammered in the media every day, copping it from the general public, even the adulation? Not everyone can survive that.
8220;Why is it that most of the champion tennis players are coming from Third World countries and the Eastern Bloc? Because they are hungry, they have the real need and desire to make it. This is the one path, one option they have got, so they are bit more focused. Kids who have grown up in First World countries have a choice between training hard in isolation for eight hours, or going out with his mates for a party.8221;

To begin with, Chappell, director of cricket, and Frazer, head coach, will be here for six-month periods each year 8220;spread actually over eight months, October to February, and then April-May, with a gap for the exam period8221;.
8220;In the first phase, we can bring through five batches with 10 days for each, introducing them to basic fitness and skill concepts. Then, in April, we get them back, study how they have progressed, assimilated the information we had given, then put them through competitive match situations in a round robin format, start sifting out the best.
8220;In the second half, they will play three modified games in a day, on three different surfaces so that they will be constantly having to adjust to different bounce, different speed. We will use different balls, some will swing, some will skid, some will bounce to simulate the conditions that they might be exposed to when they go to New Zealand, or Australia, or England, Pakistan, Sri Lanka. What the latest sports research tells you is that you want adaptability in your athletes.8221;
His new contract doesn8217;t allow him to discuss his first Indian journey8212;by the way, he knows they used to call him magarmach crocodile8212;but obviously, coaching the national team has helped this time, hasn8217;t it? 8220;Absolutely. Having seen the system in India at the highest level, I have a unique perspective to say 8216;Ok, these are the things that they need to succeed at the highest level, and we better start preparing them from here because it8217;s often too late to do it at the highest level8217;. You have seen one or two examples in recent time at the top level. Having made it to international cricket, and having gone through a period of success, they fail. And having not been trained to deal with failure, you see them floundering.
8220;We have seen the talent, that was never a problem. It8217;s about getting a structure in place that can systematically bring the talent through. There will never be a finished product, but there will at least be a product that will have the chance of survival in the big ocean of international cricket. And it8217;s a cruel ocean, you have big waves, lots of sharks, lots of holes in the boat. You can sink very easily. So, the training programme is about identifying the ones who have the best chance of survival and preparing them for that.8221;
It8217;s a programme which, Chappell hopes, will help India draw level or even pull past Australia in the years to come. But then, he had also been an interim consultant in July for the Australian Centre of Excellence, and surely they have a serious talent pool ready to keep them at No 1 for the next 10 years?
The reply is swift, unexpected, but typically front-on: 8220;No.8221;
8220;Australian cricket will have some challenges coming up. They have just gone through one of their great periods in history. They currently have four or five of the best cricketers Australia has ever had. You take Ricky Ponting, he is probably the next best bastman to Don Bradman that Australia has ever produced. You8217;ve got Mathew Hayden, Adam Gilchrist, the best wicketkeeper-batsman you8217;ve had anywhere. You had players like the Waugh brothers, Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne. They have had some inordinately exceptional talent. But it8217;s a big ask for the system to throw up another group like that. I don8217;t think they will. I don8217;t see it on the horizon this moment.
8220;And that8217;s where I believe India is best placed to challenge Australia in the future. But for that, you got to realise that the system that worked well in the 20th century won8217;t work well in the 21st century. If Infosys, Tata, Birla and Mittal were still doing business the same way they were doing 20 years ago, they wouldn8217;t be the world powers they are today. If you want the best team, you need to have the right kind of talent, the right system. This is the challenge for India.8221;
And with that, Greg Chappell packs up, one last session with the first batch, some smiles, loud laughter, a new challenge around the corner, then on to the hotel, the seventh floor roof-top grill, the crimson skyline, alone again, thousands of miles away from wife Judy. But then, this is home, for now, for sure. Till it happens, again8212;movement and change.