Sunday, December 8, 2013

How to Revamp India's Fast Bowling and dominate World Cricket


After watching India's hapless bowling attack in South Africa, it becomes abundantly clear that the world's strongest batting side needs support from it's bowling department. Here are my ideas as to what we lack and how it can be mitigated by the BCCI. A few sacrifices and changes need to be made, but if they are implemented successfully, we will be guaranteed a stream of fresh fast bowling talent.

Current state of fast bowling in India:

  1. Majority of the subcontinent wickets are extremely slow, lack bounce, grass and are in general in climates that do not support swing.
  2. Fast bowlers get discouraged by our low bouncing slow wickets.
  3. Potential players would rather take up the bat and score relatively easy centuries or try their hand at spin rather than risk hard work, effort, injuries and sacrifice for getting hammered at domestic levels by ridiculously poor and unbalanced pitches.
  4. There is no fast bowling tradition in India such as there is in Pakistan. (because of the above 3 reasons)
  5. There is abundance of talent in batting and spin\medium bowling but not enough world class talent in pace bowling.


Contrary to the popular myth, Indians are not physically less endowed than our Pakistani friends. Perhaps, the Pathans and the Pasthhuns of Pakistan are on average bigger guys, but we have the numbers to skew statistics to our favor. Take a visit to any of the northern states such as Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, many parts of UP and you will find men who are more than capable of physically dominating anyone from the world. What we lack is not potential for fast bowling, but the systems that can encourage and develop fast bowlers.

Proposal: Develop fast-bowling incubators in various parts of the country.
BCCI has to allocate various zones as being pro-fast bowling and must sacrifice batting in these regions to  more bowler friendly conditions.
Our focus must be to develop the greatest international cricket team in the world consistently.
The key is: specialization.
We must focus on regions of our country that are friendly to swing and pace such as Mohali.

The infrastructure in these regions\zones can be revamped:

  1. Import soil and develop pitches from various parts of the world.
  2. (if 1 is too hard for whatever reason) Play games using artificial mats where bounce is produced.
  3. (really aggressive policy)Change domestic rules so the new ball can be obtained more often.

This is more than possible for the richest cricketing board in the world. Let us focus on a few states and revamp all the domestic-cricket level grounds such that their pitches are tailored for pace bowling. This will ensure that we get good pace bowlers steadily from these regions. Also, a tradition of pace bowling will arise in these states. Other states that do not receive these "upgrades" will continue to develop solid batting and spin bowling as before and will get the added benefit of experiencing bouncy wickets in the domestic level itself when they tour to these "special" zones.



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