Gary Kirsten has helped Gautam Gambhir correct his problem of falling over © AFP

What is the easiest way of dealing with an out-of-form player? Drop him, send him back to play domestic cricket and wait for him to make amends before drafting him in again. Quite easy. Now, what would be the most difficult way of dealing with the same struggling cricketer? It would be to get to the root cause of the problem, help him rectify it and all this while putting an arm around his shoulder to boost his morale. Because technical glitches won’t take too long to be rectified but shattered confidence might just take an eternity to be restored.

You really don’t need a qualified person to find faults. It’s ridiculously easy to say that X player is a suspect on short-pitched deliveries and Y player can’t swing the ball anymore. But it takes not only a qualified professional but also a really patient and understanding man to rectify these mistakes.

Poor form is seldom the spin-off of one thing or one aspect of the game going wrong. The starting point of the downfall may well be negligible but you get to know its effect only when it snowballs into a much bigger and easily identifiable problem i.e. poor show on the field. For example Sreesanth’s poor bowling form often starts with his non-bowling arm coming down a tad early which eventually leads to his straying in line. The same can be said about Ishant, only that his wrist is often the culprit.

Gauti also had this perennial problem of falling over and hence was susceptible to sharp in-coming deliveries. Gary made those minor, but necessary, adjustments in his stance and head position and the rest is history. It not only changed the fortunes of his career but of the Indian team too. And Gautam is never shy in giving Gary the due credit.

If Gautam’s example spoke about the positive influence of a coach, here’s the exact opposite of that. A bowler, from a respectable Ranji Trophy team, was struggling with the problem of over-stepping. So much so, that the poor guy was bowling every delivery from at least six-eight inches over the popping crease. There were a plethora of coaches supervising his progress, or the lack of it. All that these wise men did was tell him that he was overstepping and that he needed to stop it. They had nothing more to offer to the player. Another bowler, this time on an India A tour, was bowling at least two-three no-balls in an over. To give devil its due, the coach did work with him in-between the matches, but made little headway. In fact he bowled a 15-ball over in the following game. Clearly whatever the coach did was not enough.

Now, a qualified coach would tell you that correcting the simple problem of overstepping is not rocket science and hence should have been rectified easily.

Practice doesn’t make a man perfect, it just makes him permanent. So, God forbid if a player is practicing the wrong technique, he’s just making matters worse for himself. Bowlers who are found guilty of chucking are the prime example of practising the wrong skill. It’s as much their fault as it is of their respective coaches.

The role of a coach is to first identify and then nip the problem in the bud. It’s about time that our state teams, right from the age-group teams, hire professional coaches. After all BCCI is spending millions to conduct regular coaching courses at various levels and it’ll serve its purpose only if the state associations make use of these coaches.

	Technique is perhaps one of the most important things that distinguish a good cricketer from a great cricketer; Tendulkar's great innings told us just that © Associated Press

Only the God of cricket could have made a daunting 200 look so effortless. The game of numbers isn’t one for Sachin; he has gone well past that. That evening on the 25th February, Tendulkar didn’t just break an overwhelming record, he narrated cricket’s lost story. The double ton, perhaps, brought back, the passé ‘technique’ into the game. My admiration of Tendulkar’s masterclass didn’t just stop at the record, but the manner in which he pulled it off.

You would assume that a certain amount of slogging is almost mandatory to score a double century in fifty overs. But Sachin proved that it can be done by playing good cricket and knocking some skillful cricketing shots. The reason why Sachin doesn’t need to slog his way to big runs is his impeccable technique.

Ironically though, talking technique has almost become blasphemous in modern day cricket. No longer is it only about the number of runs you score, the strike-rate at which those runs are scored is equally important if not more, especially in the shorter formats. Perhaps, there is seemingly nothing wrong about thinking in terms of strike-rate because that makes for entertaining cricket. Innovation is not an aberration anymore but a norm.

While most cricketers playing international cricket are capable of changing gears and adapting to the new demands of the game, a whole crop of youngsters trying to break into their respective state under-16, under-19 teams are not. To a young mind, the easiest way to score quickly is to take the aerial route and play adventurous shots. The impression a youngster carries is that technique restricts you from playing all the shots and hence slows you down. Little do they realize that in reality, technique empowers you to play almost every shot in the book or perhaps more. It’s the technical dexterity and not slogging which enabled Sachin to score a double century off merely 147 balls.

I see that the role of a cricket coach more important now than ever before. He ought to help a youngster find the right balance and ensure that he doesn’t sacrifice technique for adventure. But are these coaches well equipped to ensure that a youngster doesn’t go astray? The answer is an unfortunate No. Only a few cricket academies in the country are run by qualified coaches. Others are merely organized net practice facilities which would rarely produce good cricketers. We may not be able to organize the cricket-academy sector but we can always ensure that the coaches working with the state teams at all levels are qualified coaches. After all the BCCI organizes coaching clinics on a regular basis producing Level 1, 2 and 3 coaches. These coaches in turn should be absorbed by the state associations.

I watched a Ranji Trophy probable bowling big no-balls and all that the coaches around could possible tell him was a feeble ‘stop overstepping’. No one would tell him how to do it. Poor kid kept bowling for nearly an hour with no success. I felt sorry for the boy because it wasn’t his fault. It’s the duty of the coach to rectify mistakes, but sadly, they couldn’t. If this being the state of affairs at the First class level, pity how things would be at levels below Ranji. The way forward is most certainly a sound lesson in technique, for you can break a rule only when you know it.

Technique is perhaps one of the most important things that distinguish a good cricketer from a great cricketer. And the God of the Cricket told us just that.