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Just over a month ago, when he thumbed in the number he had not dialled for quite some time on his mobile, he knew it was the final call. India’s brightest cricketing talent of this decade had lost his place in the team, lost his bowling rhythm, lost his strike force, lost his confidence. And very nearly, lost the smile.
But yes, he did make that call. And today, that famous smile slowly spreading across his face, he says he wants to start living all over again. “I am starting to think the way I used to when I started,” says Irfan Pathan, just 22, but starting a new life.
“Irfan called us up in May, after the World Cup. He had been out of touch for over a year-and-a-half, we had been waiting, wondering why it took so long. Well, he has come back to where he had started. He has accepted that he needs some help and I welcomed him with open arms,” says Australian fast bowling great Dennis Lillee at the MRF Pace Academy in Chennai, minutes after he had pushed Irfan through another new day.
But what went wrong with Irfan Pathan? Why did it take so long? Was it his action, was it his mind, was it the fame, what was it?

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.”

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