IPL 2020 AUCTION A behind the scenes look at the making of an IPL team Smit Patel Share Tweet

"Mahela has an outstanding cricket brain" ©BCCI

In the Indian Premier League, there's little that's left to chance particularly with the amount of money being shelled out by the franchises. Ahead of the IPL 2020 Auction, James Pamment who serves as the fielding coach of four-time IPL champions Mumbai Indians, takes us through the backroom drama that unfolds before and during an IPL season.

Relationship between scouts, management and the owners

"We have a number of Scouts that operate all around India. There wouldn't be a game of competitive cricket at domestic level, First Class level, Under-23 level, Under-19 level that hasn't had eyes on it from a Mumbai Indians scout. Each scout has an area that they manage and obviously we have people who are sitting over the top of that. From a strategic and from a management point of view, someone like John Wright and Rahul Sanghvi comes and watches players who've been recommended to him by the scouts" says Pamment.

Pamment, who himself has a special eye for talent having taken the likes of Kane Williamson, Trent Boult and Tim Southee under his wings from a very young age, is also at times part of the group that gets along with head coach Mahela Jayawardene afterwards. The next step involves inviting a number of players into Reliance Corporate Park where they host a five or six day camp where lots of T20 games are played among the invited players.

"All these players that have been identified will get to showcase their skills in an environment that's very competitive. It's a very thorough process, very professionally run with a lot of very capable people involved at different layers," gushes Pamment. "You mentioned the owners, they're very engaged in the team and they're not standing back on us and allowing other people to take control. They do allow people with specific skills to offer their expertise, but certainly Akash Ambani is very hands on and he's very capable and he generally knows what he wants and knows how to work with Mahela, with John Wright and other members of the scouting team" he adds.

Pre-auction prep and exercises

"Certainly, Mahela sets the strategy. He sets the principles of what he's looking for from his batsmen, his bowlers, and his fielders. So he's very specific around what he's looking for, for particular skill sets. He is certainly looking for special qualities. But he's very clear on what he wants from certain positions" he says.

Gain Line Analytics, a sports analytics company has established a direct relationship between lower player turnovers and consistent success in one of their studies. Mumbai Indians just about ratifies that hypothesis and do not make wholesale changes to their squad and have their core intact for several years now. All of their retained players Rohit Sharma(9 seasons), Keiron Pollard(10 seaons), Lasith Malinga (10 seasons), Jasprit Bumrah (7 seasons), Hardik Pandya (5 seasons) and Krunal Pandya (4 seasons) have gelled up well together as a cohesive unit around which the team management has been filling up specific players with niche skills and well defined roles.

And with the core set, how does Mumbai go about planning their buys in an auction?

"So it's basically a mock auction," says Pamment. "All the scouts, Mahela, Akash, the senior members of the management group will sit around a table and pretend to be Rajasthan, Chennai and they'll practice open auction strategies and then they'll buy their own things. And that's I guess where you start to strategize around players of preference and if you miss out on players of preference, where do you go then. So they do practice their scenarios and there's an A, B, C, D and an E plan" he adds.

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The role of coaches in getting players match ready

Pamment also talks about being intelligent enough as a coach on what data to present to the players and refrain from cluttering their brains with an overload of information. He does not believe in tinkering with a player's natural flair or tendencies to go about things. But at the same time he believes in having some relevant information on hand puts you in a good stead to have that instinct of where the game is heading.

"I'm part of the team that does the scouting of the opposition along with Mahela and Shane Bond before the matches. So that's a big part of what we do leading into the games, analyzing batsmen, analyzing bowlers, working out where they score their runs, where they're likely to go in certain scenarios. If they face two dot balls, what are they likely to do if they bowl a no ball, what is their free hit ball likely to be, what do they do at the death, what do they do at the top? How is somebody likely to structure their death overs and what happens if they have an edge in certain areas, how are they going to react next? Are they're going to go with a slower one? Are they going to bowl a bouncer? Look at how often people pick up singles, how often people face dot balls, what they do if they face three dot balls or four dot balls. What are they going to do on the fifth ball? Are they going to do on the sixth ball, do some batsmen attack ball one and two in the over or five and six" he says.

Pamment, who believes that Jayawardene is "outstanding reader of the game" also talks about his theory of how he wants his players to be their own best coaches. He picks out an incident from the IPL 2019 final to make his point. "Malinga was about to bowl the final ball and the boys who played with Shardul Thakur at Mumbai knew that he's actually quite good at hitting pace. So they challenged Malinga to bowl a slower ball with Chennai needing two off the final ball because he struggles to pick up changes of pace. Malinga nailed a perfect slower ball and that hit him in front and we won the game. So it was tremendous execution, but that execution was formulated as a plan by the players on the field itself with some very good sense of match awareness aided by information they processed overtime" he adds.

It's a blend of data analysis, coaching and empowering players, as Pamment would endorse, that goes into the making of a successful team. And in that, perhaps, is a formula too for other teams to emulate.

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