“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.”

... contd.