Press Trust of India
Perth, Feb 25: Innovation is the name of the game if one wants to beat drudgery of mundane training sessions as Team India showed here Wednesday during their 75-minute fielding session with drills that had the cricketers interested and enjoying every bit of it.
There weren’t any ground breaking new methods deployed at the session but a bit of tweak here and there brought out the competitive spirit in them on a day when there weren’t any net sessions held.
There were two methods during fielding that really caught the attention. One was the ‘dummy catch’ session which aims at improving the reflex action of the players when it comes to sharp chances, while the second one was a ‘fielding match’ involving two groups where the winners were adjudged on the basis of successful direct hits at the two plastic stumps that were kept for aim.
The first method was an interesting one. It’s not new for teams to use tennis racquets and balls to improve the reflexes of the players standing at close range.
However assistant coach Sanjay Bangar’s session with groups of four was slightly different from the normal tennis ball catching session. Here, a group of four fielders stood in a queue with Bangar some 10 metres adrift. The moment Bangar would hit a ball with his racquet, the first fielder in queue would sell a ‘dummy’ making it compulsory for the man behind to take the catch. The second man, thus would not have much time to react to the ball coming his way.
Suresh Raina, Ravindra Jadeja and Virat Kohli were the best performers in this session. They rarely missed anything that came their way and picked up some amazing last moment reflex catches.
The next session was a ‘fielding match’ between two groups with one having comparatively better fielders including Raina, Kohli, Shikhar Dhawan, Stuart Binny while the other had the weaker lot like R Ashwin. The interesting thing about the match was when the ball was hit towards one group a member of the other group was asked to approach the ball and throw down the stumps.
In the end, the team comprising Kohli and Co won and they did make it a point to rub it in on their ‘rival team’. All in good spirit though.
