Sending out an SOS: India need to find the best bowling coach they can

Forget the new captain, forget the team director who is in an arrogant but rebuilding mood and even forget the batting collapses. You want to solve India’s problem? Find the best bowling coach you can. That is the solution. It is not that the Indian bowlers are bad. It is that they are so bad that one wonders what they are doing. There doesn’t ever seem to be a strategy of how an over is being bowled. A good delivery is inevitably followed by a bad one. Their main strategy seems to be to wait for the declaration. [caption id=“attachment_1253703” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Umesh Yadav. Reuters[/caption] It is one thing to have talent and another to harness that talent to the best of your ability. If you look at the great bowlers over the years they were either born with a natural ability to strategize or else they were developed. In the first year of the IPL, I recall hearing how young bowlers in the Rajasthan Royals squad were taught to “construct” an over by Shane Warne. Constructing an over was something that was so foreign to them that playing under Warne was like going to bowling school. You can watch Warne talk through bowling out Brendon McCullum in a T20 match here . Can you imagine how his mind worked during a Test? While Warne may have just been born with this ability, other legends were developed. Wasim Akram is a great example of this. On a number of occasions he has talked about how he and Waqar Younis were hand-held by Imran Khan. Imran would stand at either mid-on or mid-off and tell them what kind of delivery to bowl every ball. Once, when Imran’s focus was on setting the field, Wasim couldn’t start his run up because he didn’t know what ball he was supposed to bowl. Wasim would also bowl a different first ball to a debutant vs. an experienced player. Wasim and Waqar supposedly also received guidance from Javed Miandad on what goes through a batsman’s mind at various stages in a match. The training obviously paid of. It is no surprise that India’s bowling attack has struggled since Zaheer Khan’s body broke down. Zaheer played the Imran role for India. Without him. the bowlers have been lost. There doesn’t appear to be a thought process or a strategy involved. However, lets give them the benefit of the doubt and say there is a plan. Obviously it has failed miserably. It irks me every time I read or hear a former player say that a coach in cricket is not that important. It obviously is. India’s bowlers have talent but it is more scattered and messy than Rohit Sharma’s. Virat Kohli is too inexperienced to do what Imran (or Zaheer did). He also isn’t a bowler. India needs a specialist. Bharat Arun is new to the job as India’s bowling coach and so perhaps we should give him more time. However, we have not seen any improvement from the first Test of the series to the fourth so his start has not been inspiring. The bottom line is it doesn’t matter if the new captain is more aggressive than his predecessor, or if Rohit Sharma justifies his recall. If you can’t bowl out the opposition, you can’t win a Test. That is how the game works. The spiral effect a good bowling attack will have on the batting performance and the match overall will be a game changer.