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.

... contd.