For Lillee, it’s still the same

: It’s late afternoon, well past the lunch hour, when Denis Lillee walks out from the MRF Pace Foundation after a two-hour-long extended video session with the class of 2008. As the driver waits to chauffeur him to his old haunt — a suit at a five-star hotel — Lillee spends some time with the pace academy’s old hands at the gate. The modest voice of a support staff member, on first-name basis with the Aussie legend, inquires about Denis’s son Dean and his granddaughters. As the conversation moves towards the flu in Perth, it’s easy to guess these aren’t jus t casual acquaintances.

It’s been 20 years since Lillee “hit off instantly” with the late Ravi Mammen, a tyre manufacturer with a dream to add speed to Indian cricket’s bowling attack, and there is nothing to suggest that Chennai will stop being the Aussie’s second home in the near future. Lillee plays the local to the hilt as he speaks to the two physios from Griffith University in Brisbane — one of the many high-profile sporting institutions that have an MoU with the foundation. He calls up one of his old wards and arranges an evening out for the two Aussie boys before boarding the car.

Big achievement
Within an hour, he is back at the ground. And before he joins the trainees at the net session, he sits down to talk about the project he took up as a 38-year-old. Twenty years later, at an age when most Indians turn pensioners, the aging pace guru still brings back memories of a bowler with never-ending requests for “one more over” to his captains.

“I always look forward to coming to Chennai. I don’t do much coaching back home. And as long as I’m wanted, I will keep coming back.”

Lillee is aware of the BCCI’s decision to start a pace wing and the problems his star students might face in making regular trips to their old alumni, but he wishes to keep away from all that. “That’s not my area of work. I know what I have done here is a big achievement of my career. It’s something that I am proud of,” he says.

The two factors that have made Lillee keep returning to the foundation for two decades is much more than a professional bonding he shares with the Mammen family and the anticipation of watching his trainees make it big. “After...

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