Sri Lanka

Ravi Shastri

Sanjay Bangar

Virat Kohli

Anil Kumble

Africa

Sachin Tendulkar

Rahul Dravid

Sourav Ganguly

VVS Laxman

Virender Sehwag

Harbhajan Singh

Kumar Sangakkara

Mahela Jayawardene

Tillakaratne Dilshan

Thilan Samaraweera

Chaminda Vaas

Muttiah Muralitharan

Lasith Malinga

inNo throw-downs, no fielding drills... Yet, coachmanages to get all these tasks done.Ravi Shastri doesn’t give throwdowns. He has a specialist in the form of Raghavendra to do that thankless job. Shastri doesn’t work on the finer points of batsmen’s techniques. He hasto do that job. Shastri is not the man the bowlers go to in times of need. He has specifically got Bharat Arun to do that thing. Shastri doesn’t help during the fielding drills either. The India team has a specialist fielding coach in R Sridhar. Shastri is not a trained mental conditioning coach like the team once had in Paddy Upton. He, however, seems like some spiritual superpower who can do all of this by sitting down with a player over a glass of beer.The players love him as he is not overbearing, something thatis alleged to have thought about the previous coach. He can put them in a great mental space the team seemed to be missing during a home season where they lost just one of 13 Test matches. Imagine what they could have done in a better frame of mind. Maybe won 14.For the first time, he has taken over the role of the chief coach. Earlier he had been the manager and a team director. The start has been brilliant, a 304-run win in the first Test of the series. As he met the press under the shade of the Members Stand at the Sinhalese Sports Club, the cheerleader in him was alive and kicking. Past has been lost, present is great and future you and me can’t even imagine.If reports are to be believed, the India team was in all sorts of distress under Kumble. There was a total lack of trust and stories were being leaked from the dressing room. But as Shastri said, it’s all bulls**t. Nothing has changed since he left as the team director in 2016 and joined as the chief coach in 2017.“I wasn’t there for the last 12 months, so I don’t know. But when I got in, it was pretty much from where I left. I didn’t see any change — the nucleus of the team is pretty much the same. I know what to expect from them and they know what to expect from me. There is no need of reinventing the wheel or anything of that sort.”So if it is pretty much the same as it was when he left, why was he removed in the first place, and why is he back again? Anyway, the answer to that is way beyond our comprehension and in the realms of factual speculation (we know it’s an oxymoron).A senior journalist asked Shastri what exactly his role is. Shastri looked into his eyes and roared: “My role is to be in charge of the entire support staff and to make sure that we get the boys in some great mental space to go out and express themselves with nothing else on their minds but to go out and play a brand of cricket which you have seen India play over the last three years, that is positive and fearless.”The journalist asked a follow-up question. How will you do this? This time, Shastri was terse, and shot back: “That is a skill. That is why I am here and you are not there.” He is technically right.In his bombast, Shastri can lose perspective. While speaking about what is the difference in this team in terms of mentality and experience since 2016, Shastri repeated what he had said in the past. “This team has been with each other for two years and they are much more experienced now. They have already done things that a lot of Indian teams and a lot of big names couldn’t do in their careers. Like for example win a series here (in Sri Lanka) for 20 years. A lot of big names have played for 20 years. They have come to Sri Lanka many times and they have never won a series. But this team have done that.“They have won a one-day series in 20 years which a lot of teams haven’t done. (Not sure which series Shastri is referring to here as Kohli has hasn’t led India in any ODI series in Sri Lanka yet). This team is used to doing things that a lot of other teams haven’t done and that too overseas. When you say overseas like South, England, it is a lot of tough cricket coming up and I see it as an opportunity. I am very positive here that this team can do things that probably no other Indian team has done.”The thing is that Sri Lanka came into the Test arena in the 1980s and the only one since to play 20 years for India isIn the last 20 years when the Indians visited Sri Lanka, they had in their ranks the likes of Tendulkar,, Anil Kumble and. But Sri Lanka too hadand. In 2016, when India came here, almost all the names were missing and the Indian team, though young in terms of Test exposure, was much more experienced in all other aspects.Shastri was asked how he plans to be non-overbearing and give space. His reply — “When you have been around the game for 37 years, you probably learn a little bit. So that experience is very handy for me in knowing exactly how to deal with the players” — didn’t reveal anything.He did, however, give a little idea about what his role is — maybe it was by mistake — when he said, “I don’t think coaching is needed at this level. At this level, it is all about fine-tuning and getting the blokes in good mental space to go out and play the game. They know they have reached here because they are good. At times, you might need to just fine-tune them a bit because the amount of cricket that’s being played, you might just get into the odd bad habit without you realizing it. That’s where the experience of having played, probably having watched you can pick it up and pass the message.”So if his job is to just fine-tune, and he has an army of support staff to do that, why is he called a chief coach? Beer please!