INTERVIEW
Follow Us“Shot hai”
What a shot
That was the first thing I heard as I entered the NICE Academy premises on the outskirts of Bengaluru to interview Arjun Dev, Shreyanka Patil's personal coach. Dev was standing on the other side of the field, and as I crossed the ground from behind the wicketkeeper to reach him, I looked at the batter.
It was a teenage girl playing off-spin bowled by a slightly younger boy with such technical and attacking precision that it made me stop and watch her bat that full over. Instantly, it was this unique grouping of girls and boys in the same game that stood out for me.
This was the same ground where Shreyanka, probably the most popular new international women cricketer in India, learned the tricks of the trade from Dev. He started the NICE academy after working with Rahul Dravid and ensured a special focus on women’s cricket by not only training them but also managing them once their training was over.
To understand her and the unique additions she makes to the Indian side for this upcoming T20 World Cup, it made a lot of sense to ask the 35-year-old coach about his best pupil so far. Here is the full excerpt of my conversation with him, in which Dev discusses Shreyanka's development as a cricketer and her future in Indian cricket in depth.
You mentioned in one of your Instagram posts that there were only three kids to begin the academy with, and now two of your pupils, Shreyanka and Vrinda Dinesh, are also at the WPL. Shreyanka said in the RCB podcast that you asked for five years from her at the start.
We started with three kids—Shreyanka, Vrinda [Dinesh], and one other. We said we'd train you all for five to six years and then manage you as well.
In women's or even men’s cricket, everyone is in a hurry to play representative cricket. For girls, the aim is to play India when they are 16-17 because people have done that in the past, and it's more common in women's cricket than in guys' cricket. They are going to play cricket until they are at least 35. So even if you start playing international cricket at 25-26 and you play nine years of international cricket, you are going to be a great of the game. That's more than enough. So that's when I told her [Shreyanka] that even if you have five or six years, it's okay. It obviously happened one year quicker than we had planned.
Since Shreyanka’s father had already worked on some basic stuff with her being a coach himself, how did you start building this current version of her that we have come to know? How did you work on all the different aspects of her game?
Her father started her cricket journey. He used to run a small academy there and taught her the basics. And like it happens in girls, if you're half decent, you end up playing for the state early. So, when Shreyanka was 12, I think she was playing Under-19. By the time she came to me, she had exposure to Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA) and had already played Under-16 and 19. I think she was in a ZCA (Zonal Cricket Academy) camp as well. Hence, she obviously already had the exposure as a bowler.
But for us, when she came in, the first thing we wanted to start with was the mindset. That showed up in the kind of field plans we made her bowl to, with the idea being to hone her skills so that she’s not afraid of anything thrown at her and bowls to her field. Another such challenge, for example, was coming around the wicket for an off-spinner. How can you come around when you will not get LBW?
All of those things took some time, but she always had the belief. In terms of her bowling technique, she had the release and constantly kept working on the run-up, and the jump made it a little more efficient because she was struggling with a lot of back stuff then. We thought it was because of her long stride, which obviously still exists. It has to be a process that we keep doing every time.
We're just working on small technical points like that and then tactically setting fields, like what do we do for which kind of batter, etc. Then the next thing was adding variations, whether it’s an arm ball or something else. Obviously, the yorker is something she's become known for. And that just kind of almost happened. We were just playing the fool one day, and we said, 'Why can't we actually bowl yorkers?' She practised that, and she loved it.
Yeah, and I see that off-spinners in women's cricket use the yorker more than men's. I mean, it’s effective, too, because if you can bowl at a good speed and just put it right there beneath the bat, there is no way the batter can hit you.
Yeah, Shreyanka enjoys that. We're adding a few more variations to the death as well, which hopefully you'll see in the World Cup. In the case of her bowling, it's just been about putting her under pressure more than anything else. Bowling to many big hitter guys and not being flustered after being hit for a few boundaries. So there's a lot more pressure already,
Shreyanka also mentioned earlier how she bowled to Dinesh Karthik at RCB and sometimes even Sunil Chhetri here, who comes for practice at NICE. That’s helping her learn how to bowl better at the death.
DK has been very kind in that sense. He spent quite a bit of time with her. He was just another voice [of advice] basically as she only hears to me. But he kept saying to her that ‘you have the skill’. He asked her to bowl to him, and he wasn't kind to her. He smashed her for a few sixes. Otherwise, it's easy to just pretend. So that's something she enjoyed and obviously gave her a lot of confidence that if I can bowl to him, then I can bowl to any girl.
Also, Chhetri used to come here to train. He liked cricket, so whenever football games happen, he comes to get a hit and play cricket or some corporate match here. If she missed the yorker by this much, he’d definitely hit it. He doesn't take mercy. So it was good for us in that sense.
Does the confidence we see in Shreyanka, which we generally don't see in a player who has started playing for India just recently, also come from playing against better players and boys at the academy?
That's our belief, at least. That's our philosophy. There are two ways to approach it. For example, if you're batting, one way of doing it is going on a cement wicket and asking someone to just throw to you, middling every ball and saying, ‘Oh yeah, I am feeling really confident’. However, even my grandfather would probably be able to do it on cement.
The other is to put out a challenging wicket, where you might get out 10 times but hit a few good shots. If you do that, you've taken more out of that session than just going in and knocking it around on cement. So that's our philosophy: put them under pressure, make it challenging, and take whatever good out of it. It's not always about just pleasing them or making them feel good.
There's no space for the easy way out. It's just before a game if you realise that a player is really struggling. Maybe then, one day before the game, you can just knock around so that you're feeling good. But that's more of a psychological thing and is not really upskilling the players. However, our thing is that if you're skilled, you will eventually be more confident. If your skills are there and you can trust them, then confidence will come. It's not the other way around. Confidence doesn't dictate skills. Skills dictate confidence.
In terms of Shreyanka’s bowling in the Indian team, since Deepti Sharma is already there in the team and Renuka will start from one end with the ball, in case Harmanpreet wants to use a spinner, she generally goes to Deepti in the first six overs. But recently Shreyanka has also bowled quite a bit in the powerplay. How do you see that?
Yeah, we also found it strange that Harmanpreet went to Shreyanka for the powerplay whenever they played together. Against South Africa, I think she bowled two overs in the powerplay. So, I don't think they have a set plan for whether Deepti or Shreyanka will bowl. We also tried to figure out who that powerplay bowler is. I don't think there's a set powerplay bowler. They go with the flow, also.
Only the really good spinners can both drift (lateral movement of the ball mid-flight) and turn the ball on a consistent basis. But Shreyanka has been so adept at that already. Was it something she always had due to her release position, or have you actively worked on?
If there is one complaint I’ve personally had with her batting, it’s that she doesn't hit straight a lot. But I saw in a video on social media that she was hitting a lot more straight in practice. Can you talk about what needs to improve her batting and what she has already worked on?
From a batting point of view, she's a very young batter in the sense that we've really started working on her batting recently. Off-spin came naturally to her, but in the case of batting, we've been working on technique and different backlift. About now, I think, is when we've reached a stage where we feel confident about our batting that okay, she's now a proper 360-degree player. Going back a little bit, it was the sweeps and the reverse sweeps and the scoops for her. So you have to use the angles. Not everyone can do what you can. So get those runs.
And now, obviously everyone knows that as soon as she comes, there’s a deep backward point for the reverse as well as a fine leg for those sweeps, and mid-off and mid-on will also be there. So if she can hit one or two down the ground, then it becomes difficult for a captain to set the field. It's something we are working on. She just needs time in the middle.
In her case, where she’s so strong behind the wicket, do you also want to hone that particular skill? There’s a chance that she might become so good at it that it becomes her signature shot, just like we associate the six over fine leg with Suryakumar Yadav.
Like I sent her a message the other day after one of our sessions. I said, 'if you're not going to be the greatest all-rounder in the game, I'll be really, really disappointed'.
This is exactly my next question. I feel, since her development as a bowler came before her development as a batter, it's slightly unfair that she has to bat lower down the order and become a finisher, without becoming like a solid top order batter. It feels unjust.
Yeah, it’s a difficult role that she's obviously been thrust into in terms of being a finisher. It’s not the easiest for anybody. You don't have time to get set and you need to hit boundaries. You're a hero if you hit, but if you don't, you are a villain. There's no middle ground.
The only thing with her is that she bats lower down the order in domestic cricket compared to all the other all-rounders in the Indian team. They go back to either opening or number three etc. They've had years of doing that. They know how to bat.
Shreyanka never batted it in the top order. Before the WPL began, she was number 10 in the under-23 Karnataka team when she came to us. That's when we were like, no, you're not that. You are better than this. Work towards it. And in a season, she batted number six for our city. And even now, with a broken hand this year in the WPL, they had her padded up in that final (chuckles). So that's a big confidence boost. And I mean, I feel if she gets a little more time she can do much better.
The other thing is, we don't have enough time to train now compared to earlier. She was at the NCA for a long time after she got injured in the Asia Cup, so we hardly had any practice. Lot of time goes in that, whereas preparation time is obviously reduced, and that's something you have to kind of manage. So no matter how much time we have, we try and make the most of it, especially from a batting point of view.
From the bowling point of view, she's still a little more sorted, because when she goes into the India camp, she gets a lot of bowling there. Whereas obviously, because she's lower down the order, batting will not be as much. But it's fine. Work is in progress. I think we are one to one-and-a-half years away from seeing the best of batting. It can be in the WPL first to start with, and then hopefully carries on into the international circuit.
I also saw you talk about how fielding is your favourite part of the sport on your Instagram. So when I see Shreyanka field and enjoy the passion with which she tries to reach the ball and throw it back to the keeper as quickly as she can, am I seeing your passion for fielding reflected in her?
She was always a good fielder. She was always known for her fielding. I loved that feeling as well, and as a kid, I used to play first division as a fielder mainly, bat number nine and not bowl at all. So it's like we kind of found each other that way I think, but she was always a gun fielder. She keeps teasing us saying, ‘I’m still not the best fielder in the country, just amongst the best fielders. But you wait and watch in the next match.’ But I say you have to be as good as Aman [Amanjot Kaur] for me to say you're the best fielder. That’s some banter that keeps going on between us. I don't think you've seen the best of her fielding on the screen.
She's so public to accept what she did wrong in that particular game. You generally don’t see that in sportspersons as a certain level of ‘this has worked for me for all my life, I don't need anyone to tell me what I need to do’ seeps in. But with her, she'll be the first to come and accept it. So was it something in her right from the start or something that came late?
I think it's something we've made a conscious effort to work on, saying that acceptance is a good thing, and be yourself, even on social media.
People are gonna praise you when you do well, but when you don't do well, they're going to hate you. You have to enjoy that. And luckily, she enjoys the attention. She loves the camera. She is that kind of personality. So I said, be that. You don't have to pretend it to be someone else. Just be yourself. And people say, ‘Oh, so much social media.’ What else is there to do? They can't play cricket for 24 hours!
You work in media and write articles, right? How many of your Instagram posts will be of you sitting on a desk with your laptop? None! There will be more of you going out for dinner or whatever it is. So because they're not going to put posts of them playing cricket only, all that doesn't mean they're not playing cricket.
Obviously there will be people who’d say when she’s doing too much social media while not being at her best. Cut it down. I said that has nothing to do with cricket. Cricket is played on the field. Social media is done in the room, or wherever. It has absolutely no connection. So we have to be brave.
My last question – With the World Cup in mind, how do you asses her currently? Since she was injured, now she's going to play the World Cup without playing any major game before that. So is there any tension in your head regarding that? What are your hopes?
More than game time, with the preparation we’ve had, it's not been the way I would have dreamt of going into her first World Cup definitely. There's no two ways about it. And again, it's something we accept, not in our hands, not in our control. But it's about how can you manage what’s going to happen. We can't do anything about it. So we're just trying to make the most of what is left. It’s not like she's not ready, but could she have been even more prepared? Maybe, yes,
Apart from that, I just want her to be brave and show her skills. Like against Pakistan in the Asia Cup, she brought out her full repertoire of skills, which is so much fun to watch. I said I enjoyed her performance after a long time. So I'm hoping that she brings out her thing. And as I said, the new balls that we've developed for the decks, we are excited about that as well. As for the hope, win the World Cup, that’s it.
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