Big sixes and big laughs as Team India return to training in Dubai

The mood inside the Indian cricket team was energetic as the players returned to training ahead of their final group stage match of the ICC Champions Trophy. 

India have a six-day gap between matches, and after taking Monday and Tuesday off, the team turned up for what proved a rigorous three-hour net session at the ICC Academy inside Dubai’s Sports City on Wednesday. 

The session began shortly after the Team India bus arrived at 6:05pm, with Virat Kohli kicking a football around with Ryan ten Doeschate, the team’s fielding coach, while KL Rahul stretched, Rishabh Pant and Kuldeep Yadav jogged around the field and Arshdeep Singh engaged in some fun drills with a gaggle of local students. 

Training began with an amusing fielding routine in which one Indian cricketer at a time put on a helmet and stood in the middle of a few fielders, while a team-mate or member of the coaching staff hit a tennis ball high up in the air with a racquet. The objective of the man under the helmet was to line himself up under the tennis ball as it fell from the sky, and then head-butt it, with one of the fielders near him aiming to catch the rebound.

This elicited peals of laughter from the entire squad and coaches – with a few choice Hindi words thrown in for emphasis – and the mood was decidedly jovial during the 15-odd minutes of this unique drill. Rohit Sharma, India’s captain, got the fun going; Rishabh Pant, who would later smack a slew of big sixes when he batted, headed the tennis ball towards a catcher with the utmost ease; Shreyas Iyer also ‘middled’ the ball off his helmet once he got into its drop zone, on the second attempt; but poor Washington Sundar had to try to get under the tennis ball three times as Ravindra Jadeja, much to his team-mates’ amusement, failed to launch it near his target. This had Hardik Pandya, particularly, in splits. 

After the fun, the team got down to serious business. In three adjacent practice nets, the batting was divided into pairs for a little under an hour: KL Rahul and Washington in one net, facing India’s spinners and a couple local academy spinners; Kohli and Pant in the next one over, facing India’s four pacers and some nets bowlers; and then Iyer and Axar Patel taking throwdowns from the coaching specialists. 

Rahul, Kohli and Pant found their groove almost immediately. Rahul essayed some pretty shots along the ground off the spinners, off the front foot and back, and was soon hitting the ball over the white picket fence dotting the ground. Kohli played three powerful pull shots, one of which flew over the deep midwicket boundary. But it was Pant, showing no signs of discomfort or the viral flu he had reportedly picked up, who had journalists, security guards and members of the ICC staff scattering whenever he launched a cricket ball back over the bowlers’ heads. 

Several of Pant’s sixes thudded into the wall off the indoor nets at the ICC Academy, while one landed on the roof of the building. Rahul also hit several such lusty blows over the sight screen, forcing an senior Indian journalist off his haunches as he sat on against the window pane of the indoor nets taking a phone call. 

Washington had a couple tough moments against Jadeja, who after beating the left-handed batsman on the move broke into a mock celebration where he twirled his two index fingers and exaggeratedly shuffled his hips on the way towards the ‘dismissed’ victim. One of the nets bowlers was a good left-arm spinner, and he too had Washington hurrying to defend after an initial movement forward, and once beat the batsman off the back foot. 

Kohli, after the others had ended their sessions, kept batting for maybe 20 minutes longer, taking some time to adjust to the spinners’ lines and lengths. He looked more comfortable when driving and pulling Arshdeep, Pandya, Mohammed Shami and Harshit Rana. Of the four quicks, Rana looked like the one who was not keen to hit full throttle, but the most promising sign was that Shami appeared in good rhythm three days after he clutched his shin during the Pakistan game.