Rain interruptions are supposed to be the best time to brood over troubles. Yesterday Rahul Dravid, fresh after facing a fiery Glenn McGrath, thought of his biggest problems area — the young pacers’ inconsistency in line and length — during the two-hour break.

On the way out, when play resumed, he suggested to RP Singh, S Sreesanth, Irfan Pathan and Munaf Patel to have a close look at the Aussie great.

Patel parked himself just outside the boundary line to get a ringside view of the legend but soon he realised that someone, with far closer proximity to McGrath, had already imbibed the same lesson that he aspired to learn.

That’s the advantage the 24-year-old Mitchell Johnson and the other Aussie pacers have after the ‘McGrath master class’ that they regularly attend at nets and during games. And that has been a major reason for their stand-out show in this congress of Generation Next pacer at Kuala Lumpur.

If one takes out pacers like Ajit Agarkar and Brett Lee from the equation, the total ODI aggregate of the all the young quicks from India, Australia and the West Indies put together can’t match the experiece of Glenn McGrath. If his ODI count (261 matches) is the highest, his economy rate here has been the best at 3.33 — despite the fact that this has been a tournament of blazing starts.

That’s all because of that famous instantaneous “in-the-team-and-on-the-coin” control that Australian captain for tomorrow’s game Mark Hussey refers to as “always on the 20 cents’’. And from his position at mid-on he is constantly passing on tips to the next generation Aussie pacers and at every given opportunity they have acknowledged McGrath’s vital inputs.

... contd.