Don't let former players’ experience go waste: Dravid tells state units

Mumbai, August 12

Use the expertise of former players as much as possible in the state teams’ cricketing set-up was one of the notable suggestion by NCA head Rahul Dravid while interacting with members of affiliated units during a webinar organised by the BCCI.

Secretaries and cricket operations heads of various state units joined a webinar which was attended by Dravid, BCCI-NCA head of Education Sujith Somasundar – a former India ODI opener – and trainer Ashish Kaushik.

While the discussions were primarily on various components of fitness data collection and resumption of fitness training in COVID-19 world, Dravid enlightened the administrators with various situations and effective ways of troubleshooting mechanisms.

“Rahul never said that it is a mandatory thing but his suggestion to states was that we should try and use former players in their area of expertise,” a secretary of one of the state units, who attended the webinar told PTI on conditions of anonymity.

“If they can be integrated into the cricketing set-up, their experience and expertise will not go waste.”

Asked about other topics, the trio of Dravid, Kaushik and Somasundar said that NCA was planning a two-phased training resumption – virtual and physical.

“Virtual training will be the way forward,” they said.

“In current circumstances, it will be difficult that 25 or 30 players will be training together. So state team’s trainers and phsyios will have to help players virtually and phase-wise a few can come and train physically,” he said.

Kaushik spoke about how there should be a balance between strength training and skills training.

“He spoke how strength training should be less when you are doing skills training and vice versa,” the official said.

Also, there was a suggestion that there should be an emphasis on the collection of “diverse data”.

“They suggested that state team physios should try and collate as much as diverse physical data with regards to a player so that it helps in future during rehabilitation programmes,” he said. PTI