Purnima Rau. Tushar Arothe. Ramesh Powar. WV Raman. Four coaches in four years. One was said to be arranging too many practice sessions. One was said to be not paying enough attention during practice sessions. One had the famous fallout with a senior player that drew parallels with the Ganguly-Chappell saga.
For a side that did not play a single game for a year until recently, and plays far too few as a matter of routine, the India women’s cricket team surely goes through a lot of coaches. Results have not slowed down the revolving door. Coaches have exited after getting the team to the World Cup final in 2017, T20 World Cup semi-final in 2018 and T20 World Cup final in 2020.
Invariably, they have had something – or plenty, in Powar’s case – to say about the team culture. Some players do not respect coaches, Rau had said. There is too much appeasement and no accountability of players, according to Arothe. Raman left little unsaid when he wrote that some in the system had been “seemingly obsequious to an accomplished performer for years.” True to his nature, Powar had been the most straightforward, alleging in 2018 that Mithali Raj was “blackmailing” and “pressurising coaches.”
It can be no one’s case that all four coaches, variously accomplished in their own right, were all in the wrong and the players, more particularly Raj, were all in the right.
It is also no one’s case that cricket isn't a coach’s game, not yet at least, despite all the advances in planning and data analysis. Virat Kohli had his way with the exit of Anil Kumble and the return of Ravi Shastri. But the women’s team is a more complicated case, in that there are other power centres in the form of Harmanpreet Kaur and Smriti Mandhana, both of whom had asked the board to continue with Powar after his feud with Raj. That he couldn't get another term was in part due to Raj’s hold.
That he has been recalled for a second stint now is a marker that things are changing, and will continue to. Raj no longer plays T20Is, the format in which differences primarily arose between her and Powar. She has stated in the past that the 2021 ODI World Cup is her last goal. The tournament, now postponed to 2022, is less than ten months away. Powar’s two-year stint could thus outlast the remainder of her career. In any case, playing too many dot balls, one of Powar’s major grouses with Raj, does not matter as much in ODIs.
How they will get along after all the mud-slinging less than three years ago is another matter. What is certain is that Powar did bring something to the table in his short first stint, so much so that Kaur had declared then that “he has changed the face of Indian women's cricket team both technically and strategically.”
Looking forward to take india women's cricket ahead. Thanks a lot CAC & bcci for this opportunity. https://t.co/mpa7uuocps
— RAMESH POWAR (@imrameshpowar) May 13, 2021
Apart from shaking things up with moves such as getting wicketkeeper Taniya Bhatia to open in T20Is, Powar was credited with improving communication within the team, which could be a difficult place for newcomers to blend in.
“The best part about Ramesh is that he is getting everyone to talk," Veda Krishnamurthy had said before the 2018 T20 World Cup. "If there's anything running in our mind, he wants us to openly have a conversation about it, which wasn't the case earlier. Players are sitting and discussing what their role should be in the team and what they should actually do. There's a lot of cricket being spoken. I think everyone likes it. You don't hold back anything and you're speaking your mind. That's the biggest change in the dressing room."
Of course, there can be no escaping the feeling that Powar may have used a sledgehammer when a chisel may have done in dealing with a player of the stature of Raj. He has acknowledged that back then, he knew only one way of coaching: Being aggressive, in large part due to his early years in the Mumbai dressing room with several international heavyweights, in whose presence he thought he would be “bulldozed” if he wasn’t aggressive.
He has also claimed that time at the National Cricket Academy under Rahul Dravid has transformed his approach to coaching. “The Rahul Dravid school of coaching is to know the player better, his life, his struggles, and the pressure that he is under,” Powar had told mykhel.com. “You have to think from the player's perspective and what he is going through.”
He took charge of a Mumbai side that had finished at the bottom of their group in the Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy and guided them to the Vijay Hazare title. He has said that he would not have been able to achieve what he did with Mumbai had he gone straight into the role after his bitter experience with the national women’s team, without the NCA detour in between.
Aditya Tare, the Mumbai veteran who made a title-winning 118 in the Vijay Hazare final, said he enjoyed playing under Powar. “He was brutally honest with everyone in the team, whether it be good or bad things,” Tare said. “He put everything on the plate with all his heart. He asked the right questions to the squad and the players reacted well. All he demanded was good attitude and more than 100 percent effort on the field.
"His man-management skills were outstanding. He addressed a lot of things with each and every player, and he did it in front of people so that the messages were passed on clearly and openly.”
Mumbai is still home territory, after all. Starting with the England tour in June, it is Powar’s second crack with India Women that will be the real test of whether his time at the NCA has indeed made him a more empathetic, nuanced coach, as he claims.
India are playing a Test match in addition to three ODIs and three T20Is, meaning Raj will be captain for the majority of the tour. She has been used to doing things her way for longer than the Indian women’s game has been under the BCCI. England will be followed by another three-format tour of Australia after which the ODI World Cup will come knocking. Suddenly, after a year’s drought, there is so much to play for, for the team, the captain(s) and, of course, the coach.
from Firstpost Sports Latest News https://ift.tt/3oxdhRI
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