AS the sun peeped out over the edge of a thorny jungle near Jaipur, a bunch of peacocks watching warily from a distance, no horns, no traffic, no fans, no TV cameras, the tall Australian started to shuffle his feet. Slowly, the arms went up, then a leg, and as his new “team” gathered around him, its most colourful face, Gagandeep Singh, son of a dhaba owner from Alwar, turned on the volume of the car stereo—Aa ja nach le.
It’s passing-out day for Greg Chappell, in a way. And, after that tense, rock-climbing session, it’s passing-out day, for real, for his first batch of trainees at the Future Cricket Academy in Rajasthan.
“I have never seen that happen in a cricket camp before. It was a spontaneous expression of joy. And this, for me, is the most positive feedback I can hope for at this stage. Over the last two weeks, these kids have had a blast, and so have I,” says Chappell, the familiar deadpan mask slipping, just for a few seconds.
So, what is the former Australian captain, legendary cricketer, former coach of a superstar Indian team doing in the foothills of the Aravalli ranges, dancing like a Punjabi possessed? Well, six months after that noisy exit from Mumbai, seven months after his two-year national coaching stint got buried under the rubble of India’s disastrous World Cup campaign, the 59-year-old from Sydney has started living again.
He is now the central figure in a multi-crore rupee mega coaching project that’s fast taking shape in Jaipur, driven by the Indian cricket board’s marketing whiz and its Vice-President Lalit Modi, funded largely by the Future Group of Pantaloon and Big Bazaar.
Packaged tactfully as a “training programme” for Rajasthan cricket, the actual three-year blueprint of what’s going to happen here is simply breathtaking, even for Chappell:
*30-room global academy building at the Sawai Man Singh Stadium
*24 practice pitches with different surfaces, including cement, five indoor pitches
*e-library at the basement to be set up by IBM
*Monitor in every room where trainees can access their day’s footage
*Cameras that will map every inch of the facility and ultimately hook up to the Internet, enabling parents to track their kids from anywhere in the world*And the works: swimming pool, sauna, gym, a separate cricket ring for simulated matches, and an obstacle course
*Not surprisingly, in just two weeks since they began, the first call has already come from a business group in Australia which wants to replicate the model for an international sporting facility. “We have got a call from another state in India, too,” says Chappell.
But then, the real story behind the “bricks and mortar stuff” is Chappell himself. And the logo that he has worked out for the programme—the Ashok chakra, with the words ‘Movement’ on top and ‘Change’ below.
“Movement needs change. The Ashok chakra is about movement and change, it’s the centre of your national flag. It’s perfectly apt for the flag, it’s perfectly apt for what we are trying to do here. We need these kids to move on, move forward, and to do that, you need change. That’s what the wheel is about,” he says, unusually animated now, his hands cutting huge arcs in the air, inside his office at the stadium, amidst a pile of practice cones, plastic ropes, cricket bats, bastketballs, stumps, posters and CDs.
Movement and change—it’s perfectly apt for Chappell, too, especially after those tumultuous two years that ended with reports of a team split down the middle, serious differences with top stars, a visit to a Mumbai hospital for a stress check, and on to the airport.
Movement? “I have been through periods of introspection, acceptance. The acceptance that for anything you are involved in, you are responsible for what happened. You had a part to play in that. You can’t divorce yourself from that. Again, in any relationship breakdown, nobody is right 100 per cent, and nobody is wrong 100 per cent. There were things that happened where I thought we did well, there were things that happened where we didn’t do as well as we could have. I can certainly say that about myself. I have dealt with it, and now I look forward.”
And change? “When I look back on my cricket career, my best lessons came from the toughest experiences. Failure was where you learnt the best lessons from. Good days don’t teach you as much as the bad days. A lot of the focus now is on what happened at the World Cup, but there were another 20 months before that when we were involved in Indian cricket, and much of it was very successful—first series win in the West Indies in 35 years, first ever Test match win in South Africa, world record chase in one-day cricket. Ten new players came in at that time, many of whom went on to play in the winning Twenty20 World Cup team. You can’t ignore those things either.”
Well. About a month after he boarded that plane from Mumbai, Chappell got a call from Modi, who also heads the Rajasthan Cricket Association, to remind him of an old visit. “When we came here for the Champions Trophy last November, he showed us the facilities that were coming up. He was very proud of them, but I asked him, ‘Well, you’ve got the bricks and mortar stuff. Now what are you going to put in them?’”
“Around May, he spoke to me about a full-time commitment. But I was not willing to give that because I had some other commitments. Besides, I didn’t want a full-time commitment in cricket, in India or anywhere else. I wanted to be doing a few different things at the same time. What I suggested was a combination; Ian Frazer (who had assisted Chappell during the India stint) and I could manage the programme over three years, which we believed would be ideal for the academy. Ian would be here for six months every year on a day-to-day basis, and I would be in and out regularly. It sort of went back and forth, and things started moving in August. By mid-September, we had the details worked out, but we didn’t actually sign the contract till this week.”
Chappell and Frazer landed in Jaipur on September 29, armed with a basic curriculum framework for the target group of cricketers aged 16-19 years, which emphasised on a few key concepts: developing functional strength, training in match situations, coping with failure early, and building athletes who can adapt to any form of the game, Twenty20 to Test cricket, “not body builders”.
And that explains the rock-climbing party, and yes, the cooking session last Friday. “They got some basic ingredients, like the bat and ball in cricket, and the recipe which really is the strategy. The challenge was to try and put it all together to come up with the best combination. The idea here is to drill in the message through simple activities that you do in your daily life, not through books.
“Hours and hours in the gym is not the answer. Many of these guys don’t have access to gyms anyway when they return home from here. What we are looking for is functional strength, strength in the long muscles of the body, in the forearm, back, thighs—as opposed to short muscles that you get in the gym. We don’t want bowlers who are muscled up in the shoulders, we want them to open their chest out, who are stronger in the back rather than in the front. You look at someone like Kapil Dev, long, lean athlete, that’s what you need.
“So the sort of training that the Indian Army does, the sort of training that young boxers or wrestlers or gymnasts do, that’s the sort of training cricketers should be doing, young cricketers in particular. That’s where we are heading here.”
Bit of an overload, perhaps, considering that only a handful of his first batch of 20 has completed formal school education? But then, that’s why these concepts are translated into simple take-home exercises. “Once they understand the basic postures, it is as easy as washing the cows back home, or the car, or cycling to school,” says Chappell.
And that’s also why the routines here include wrapping the cricket ball in a sock, hanging it from the ceiling, and hitting it first on the front foot, then the back. And again, why you have this wrist-strengthening exercise where you tie one end of a rope around the middle of a stick and the other around a brick—you have to roll up the brick by rolling the stick with both hands, and down again.
Besides, Chappell this time has a set of five local coaches taking turns to translate and ensure that the message gets through—though trainees do get away with the odd retort. The wrist exercise had Rohit Rathee, a tall, fumbling fast bowler from Ganganagar, muttering, again and again, “Baap re, mar gaye.”
But yes, they are enjoying every bit of it—frog jumps with the boxing coach in the adjacent state facility in the same compound, gymnastics, wrestling. Says Tanveer-ul-Haq, the son of a tailor from Dholpur: “In the wrestling hall, their coach playfully asked Chappell sir to wrestle with him for 30 seconds. He replied, ‘Ok, I will do that if you play my game for 30 seconds. And in cricket, there’s always a toss, and I have won it, so you bat first against my pace bowlers’. That shut him up.”
Chappell says, after Team India, coaching boys from the outposts of Rajasthan has been an education for him, too.

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