The Sunday Express, after talking to Irfan, touching base with his former coach Greg Chappell, and spending time at the MRF Pace Academy in Chennai with his mentor TA Sekar and the legendary Lillee, can now reveal the real story. Of a swing bowler who lost his action bit by bit in the race for pace; of a team that was going through its darkest phase (“Sir Gary”, “Chappell ka chamcha”); of a coach and his assistant who thought they knew what was wrong; of an overeager cricketer who started sinking in a quicksand of “expert” opinions.

It’s a story with an interesting subplot, too—a simmering face-off between Irfan’s team coach Chappell and his academy coach Lillee on the road ahead for India’s young pace brigade.
“Bullshit,” says Lillee, when told that Chappell, his former Australia captain, thought Irfan needed to work “as much on his mind as his body”.
“That’s bullshit,” repeats Lillee, adding, “When you are not bowling well, obviously your mind gets cluttered but that wasn’t the cause, that was the effect. When you coach, you should stick to coaching about what you know.
“To me, what was wrong was, purely and simply, his action. Some impurities came into his action. That causes you to be unable to bowl the way you want to bowl, decreases your speed. That’s exactly what happened to Irfan,” says Lillee.
Says Sekar, “Chappell called Dennis and me to Bangalore to see all the fast bowlers (most of them had been through the MRF Academy) soon after he took over in June, 2005. At that time, Chappell told us he would work very closely with us and that he wanted to formalise a relationship between the BCCI and us. But he then brought Ian Frazer as his assistant, they started working with the boys. We got the message.”

Six months later, in January 2006, just after Team India had reached Karachi to play the third Test against Pakistan, the final five-day game of a gruelling, lifeless tour, Irfan began to feel uneasy for the first time.
“I took Greg and Ian to the video analyst’s room, and told them that something was not right. I told them ‘I am not feeling good here’. Greg told me there was nothing seriously wrong, just some minor stuff. But any coach would have said that because even then I was bowling in the right areas,” says Irfan.
“Within two-three days I got that hat-trick in the Test in my first over. I kept bowling, I also kept getting wickets. But I knew something was wrong in the action.”
By the end of April 2006, just before their next stretch of matches that would go all the way till the World Cup, Team India got nearly a month’s break. They had just finished a two-game one-day series against Pakistan in Abu Dhabi, they were to go to West Indies for a 56-day tour in three weeks.

“That was when I committed my biggest mistake,” says Irfan. Chappell was not very keen on it, but Irfan, instead of grabbing some valuable rest, worked his contacts to wrangle a trip to Canberra and train with Comets, a local club.
Why? Chappell feels Irfan, by then, had become obsessed with increasing his pace, when all he needed to do was “think like a swing bowler”, pitch the ball up and focus on hitting the batsman’s pads.

Irfan agrees, partially. “Yes, with the swing, I wanted that extra zip. Looking back now, I should have come to Chennai.”
“Then we went to the West Indies (May-July). I started well in the one-dayers, but then I didn’t play some games, and things started going wrong again. When you don’t play, you lose something. Things started getting worse and worse and worse,” he says.
Chappell, by now, had begun to focus on “attitude, confidence and thought processes”. But Sekar says what Irfan needed at that time was specific advice. “He was twisting awkwardly at delivery, his speed was dropping, he was not able to bowl a good line and length. But then, I think there was maybe a fear among the players that if they went elsewhere for help, Chappell and Frazer might get offended. Even Dennis found it a bit odd that the boys were not being sent here, the place where they honed their skills,” he says.

Soon, Irfan was seeking advice from almost everyone he could catch hold of. According to Chappell, “He was determined to be a fast bowler and spoke to Ian Bishop, Colin Croft, Andy Roberts and anyone else about how to bowl faster. In Malaysia, he spoke to Jeff Thomson and Danny Morrison. Everyone, with the best of intentions, gave Irfan something else to think about and to try. By the end of that series, he was in a real mess and was also in a state of denial, so we just tried to keep his morale up as much as possible.”

Irfan now admits that an overdose of advice “does affect you, at the end of the day”. As for filtering sense from all those opinions, Irfan says “sometimes it gets difficult. But you’ve got to accept the fact that they are doing it to help you, not harm you.”

Meanwhile, “there was a brief spell in the Champions Trophy (October-November) when I was bowling really well, especially in our first match against England. But again, the next time, things didn’t work. I still feel if I had got at least two consecutive good outings, I could have got back. But that didn’t happen. Then things started getting bad again.”

Well, bad is not the word. Irfan played just three one-dayers in South Africa (November-December), was not picked for the first Test. And then, embarrassingly, he was sent back to India by skipper Rahul Dravid who could not find a slot for him in the team for the rest of the tour.

“In the Port Elizabeth one-day game, I bowled really well. I didn’t get any wickets, but that was a good spell that largely went unnoticed. Unfortunately, things were being measured in terms of wickets, not in good spells. In the end, even I started feeling the pressure... I never cried, but I came close to it maybe four or five times, once in South Africa, twice in the West Indies,” says Irfan.

He returned to play for Vadodara but “obviously, it was not a good feeling. I was convinced though because Rahul wanted me for the World Cup. Rahul told me, ‘Don’t expect when you go there you are going to take a lot of wickets. Just take it slowly, don’t put too much pressure on yourself’.”

By then, Chappell’s coaching stint had entered its most turbulent face, with the Aussie’s vision for tomorrow having no place for the stars of today. Irfan, one of the younger faces, the TV ad star, Chappell’s new all-rounder (“Sir Gary”, as in Gary Sobers, was just one of the cruel nicknames), got caught in between.

Chappell believes that phase leading up to the World Cup, when nasty jokes and black humour started doing the rounds along with a bit of “bullying”, drove Irfan to the edge. “I have no idea about all that, I was focused on my game,” says Irfan.

Then, there was the fame, the harsh media spotlight, the screaming horde of fans wanting a piece of the “handsome” star at every airport lounge, every hotel lobby. “He might have got a bit carried away by the celebrity status, I guess,” says Sekar.

Irfan’s extended batting practice stints with Chappell—and that century in a practice game in South Africa—only added more noise to the nasty buzz. “That’s where people got it completely wrong. I don’t know how many people know it but I started honing my batting skills with John Wright. In fact, it was my batting that kept me going throughout the low phase. At least, something was working,” says Irfan.

By now, Sekar says, Irfan’s action was a complete mess (see graphic).
And not surprisingly, Irfan couldn’t find a place in the World Cup XI, watching his team crash out from the dressing room. Then, in May, the BCCI called for a bowlers’ camp in June, before the team for England was to be announced. “That was when he first called,” says Sekar.

And well, they started from the beginning — from the first grainy video frame of 2001. “We made him walk up to the bowling crease first, then jog, without holding the ball. Imagine, an India player bowling without the ball! With the ball, the mind is always worried about bowling good length, hitting the stumps, outswing, inswing, everything. Without the ball, your thoughts become more focused on your action,” says Sekar.

“Then, after a couple of days, we gave him the ball and asked him to jog up and bowl, just 50 per cent. Only in the last 2-3 days did we ask him to bowl up to 70-80 per cent. Now, he is able to get everything right in 3-4 balls out of every six, which is fantastic considering the condition he was in when he came here. But then, he has always been a thinking, intelligent cricketer, now he knows what to do.”
So will Irfan Pathan, ICC’s emerging player of the year in 2004, the boy from Vadodara’s Jama Masjid who knocked out Australian giant Adam Gilchrist on his debut Test in Adelaide, the sparkling star who once had the swaggering Pakistanis stumbling back to the dressing room in a daze, ever come back?
Hope he does, says Chappell; sure, he will, says Lillee; of course, says Sekar. “Inshallah,” says Irfan Pathan.