Developing Young Indian Cricketing Talent

India’s bowling in the current test series against Australia has been described as Jasprit Bumrah accompanied by the bowling attack of an English county second XI. While Bumrah’s performance has led justifiably to him being called the best pace bowler in the world, it is also true that the rest of the attack has been toothless. Added to India’s woes is the inconsistency of the middle order with Rohit Sharma now being a pale shadow of his former cricketing self. Virat Kohli too is in the twilight of his career so India, unless a miracle occurs, has squandered its chance of playing in the World Test Championship.

The weakness of India’s bowling and batting must in part be laid at the steps of the BCCI which, in its bid to maintain the market value of the IPL franchise, has kept Indian players from plying their trade in other parts of the world. Now, in the long term interests of Indian cricket, the time has come to change that.

Learning from Others

Cricketers fall in two categories: those who are formidable in their home conditions; and the rare few who can perform well in any part of the world under any playing conditions. The bulk of the players in South Asia fall in the former category since they are successful on home grounds — what the late English test player and coach Bob Woolmer called “flat track bullies” — but are not as impressive abroad (similarly, Indian bowlers do well on the spin friendly tracks in the country).

In the latter category come players like Garry Sobers, Malcolm Marshall, Sunil Gavaskar, Viv Richards, Curtley Ambrose, Greg Chappell, Vinoo Mankad, and Steven Smith to name a few. While all these players had undeniable talent, one of the reasons they became good players in all conditions was that they learnt their craft by playing in the domestic leagues of different countries.

Garry Sobers’s exploit with Nottinghamshire and South Australia are well known including his hitting Malcolm Nash for six sixes in one over. But as Sobers points out in his autobiography, he learnt a lot from playing club cricket in the Lancashire and Yorkshire cricket leagues. It was in the Lancashire leagues that he learnt to experiment with his bowling, particularly by adding fast-medium bowling to his arsenal. Vinoo Mankad played in the Lancashire leagues and if foreign players had been allowed to play county cricket in his times Mankad would certainly have been a prize catch. A young Greg Chappell honed his skills at Somerset and his brother Ian Chappell did so at Lancashire.

While the list of players is endless, it is important to understand why playing abroad is important. It gives players the experience of playing in different conditions and of honing their skills at a less challenging level. Your chances of being selected for India are not dependent on how well you perform in the Lancashire league or playing club cricket in Sydney. But playing in these varied conditions gives batsmen and bowlers the knowledge of how to better adapt to foreign conditions and to learn how to improve their batting and bowling.

This is particularly the case for bowlers for if you want to learn how to bowl seam and swing, Indian conditions and flat batting tracks are not particularly helpful. But in England or New Zealand these arts can be mastered. Similarly, bowling on hard tracks in Australia or South Africa give the bowler the incentive to bowl faster and more aggressively.

If one looks at the golden generation of Indian spin — the 1960s to the 1970s — both Bedi and Venkatraghavan played in the English county championship as did Dilip Doshi and Uday Joshi. While Bedi and Venkat were world class bowlers, Doshi and Joshi could have walked into the test side of any other country apart from India. If playing abroad helps cricketers mature, what can the BCCI do to facilitate this?

The BCCI has been reluctant to let players go abroad to ply their trade because the organization thinks that this will diminish the brand value of the IPL. Having Yashavi Jaiswal play in the Australian Big Bash would make that tournament more attractive and lower the value of the IPL. Today, only when players like Yuvraj Singh retired were they were given permission to play abroad. Thus, while there is some truth to this concern it does not mean that every Indian cricketer should be bound by these terms and conditions.

For the 2023-2024 season, the BCCI put 30 cricketers under contract in the categories A+ to C. The largest group of players, fifteen, were in the C category and only some of these will actually be shoo-ins into the Test, ODI, or T20I teams so that means the rest can be allowed to ply their trade abroad when the IPL is not in session. Rinku Singh, Prasidh Krishna, and K.S. Bharat are not household names in India and sending them abroad does not lead to a diminishment of the BCCI’s brand value.

Yet, if Prasidh Krishna spent a summer in the Lancashire league or playing club cricket in Australia, he could come back a better bowler. Additionally, if one goes to the uncontracted players, there is no harm in sending them abroad and they can always be brought back in an emergency because the BCCI’s coffers are so plentiful that it could compensate any team for prematurely releasing a player.

Also, as youngsters come out of the under-19 team, they should be encouraged to ply their trade abroad and to learn a range of skills in other countries. This is also a lot easier to do now since the BCCI has brought about the horizontal integration of cricket by helping Indian cricket franchises like Super Kings, Mumbai Indians, Sunrisers Hyderabad, and Rajasthan Royals have bought teams in the South African, UAE, West Indian, and USA cricket leagues. This should allow players who are not yet ready for the rigors of the IPL or Indian Test and ODI duty to improve and experiment in these leagues.

If one lesson should come from the Melbourne test between Australia and India it is that players need to develop so that they can perform creditably in different countries and under varying conditions. Time, therefore, for the BCCI to show some imagination in player development.

(Amit Gupta is a Senior Fellow with the National Institute for Deterrence Studies, USA. He also writes on sports and politics and is currently working on a book on why the BCCI dominates global cricket)