Someone like Robin Uthappa, for example, who has done a fair bit of wicket keeping as a young man could, likewise, spend a week there training with a wicket-keeper and developing a second skill. He would, probably, never be picked as a second wicket-keeper but in case he was in the side and the regular man went down, the team would have someone to turn to. For Uthappa, it is the opportunity to provide a better basket of skills to the selectors and the captain.

I’d recommend we go further and hold a batting camp for bowlers. We all know what happens during the nets. The batsman bat and the bowlers bowl and when the time comes for the bowlers to get a hit, the batsmen are fooling around with the ball and dishing up the kind of stuff that will never be bowled in a match. And so the bowlers, already inadequate with the bat, never get to improve. They don’t need to average 20 with the bat, but hang around and make ten or fifteen and help thirty or forty get added to the team score. At one level, people like Munaf Patel and Ishant Sharma need to learn, at another people like Piyush Chawla, who can bat, can aim towards becoming all-rounders.

This development of a second skill has long been practiced by good companies who, for example, get excellent software engineers to learn communication skills which will come in handy later on in their careers. I believe cricket is ripe for such specialised second skills coaching. It might have been a hindrance all along when the academy didn’t have either the desire or the manpower to do anything significant. Now, we can and this will go a long way in producing more rounded cricketers. If India seek to dominate world cricket, it needs to produce cricketers who can do more.

... contd.