'My ODI length influenced my Test bowling negatively'

Subash Jayaraman: For the majority of your career, you were a fast bowler who bowled slightly back of a length, and the delivery that came slightly in to the right-hander. If you want to pitch it up, how hard is it to do - physically, biomechanically and psychologically?

Javagal Srinath: I think any sport is very cognitive in nature. You learn a lot of things when you watch. When you see your own pictures, it is quite easy to grasp what you are seeing. We had videos and stuff, but that wasn't really the right thing, I suppose. What we wanted was the technology that came in 2000, where we could see what we did on a ball-by-ball basis. The access to information was rapid and also more specific. Had there been that technology earlier in my career, it would have been a different story altogether. That is the way life is, I suppose. There were bowlers who were bowling without technology and they were getting wickets - that is a different issue. But everybody learns in a different way.

I was always just short of length, and I knew that I was just short of length. Initially I used to play a lot of ODIs and didn't play much Test cricket in India. It was working for me in ODIs - I didn't pitch the ball up, and the ball was coming in, cramping the batsman a bit. Since my Test bowling was influenced by my ODI bowling, that length was something I got used to. I should have gotten out of it earlier.

SJ: You made your debut in Australia, on pitches that provided pace and bounce, where you can bowl back of a length and still be threatening the outside edge regularly. Did that have any effect on your approach?

JS: Yes, you get a bit carried away when you see a bit of bounce coming on, while Indian strips offer you nothing. You go to Australia and you see the ball getting carried all the way to the shoulder of the keeper - you definitely get carried away. I knew that. But you've got to change quickly.

What was the change? How did I want to change? Those things happen very slowly in sports. What you do and what you are successful in, you tend to follow it for a longer period. I was more influenced by my ODI technique of bowling and that carried on to my Test matches as well.

SJ: If the batsman drives you down the ground or through cover because you pitched it up two feet, how instinctive is it to want to immediately pull the length back?

JS: If you are an inswing bowler you tend to bowl short-of-length deliveries all the time. If you are bowling an outswinger, you probably can pitch the ball up. That is also a part in me pitching a bit short. If you, as an inswing bowler, pitch it up, it becomes quite easy for the batsman. If you are an outswing bowler, the ball would be beating the bat or taking the edge. Sometimes, as an inswing bowler, if you pitch the ball up and it moves, it takes an inner edge and goes onto the pads. Had I bowled outswingers, maybe I would have changed that line [and length] a little earlier [in my career]. I wouldn't have been bowling that short.

SJ: At what point in your career did you feel that you were as complete a fast bowler as you thought you could be?

JS: I was a late entrant to Test cricket, at the age of 23. By the time I was a permanent Test member, I was already 27. I didn't have the bowling experience that generally someone would possess by then. Ideally you should be getting into the Test scene by 20-21 and by 23 you have a fair idea of where you want to bowl. And then I injured my shoulder and lost around six to seven months of cricket. Obviously the bowling altered a bit after that. I lost a bit of pace.

SJ: How frustrating was the late entry? You had Kapil Dev and Manoj Prabhakar ahead of you in the queue and they played most of the home Tests. You played in Australia and South Africa, but at home you had to warm the bench.

JS: It can be disappointing when you don't figure in the playing XI. But [as a pace bowler in an Indian team at home] it is more of a symbolic representation. Even Kapil Dev, at times. You had three spinners in the team winning matches left, right and centre, and Manoj would open the innings and Kapil would play the allrounder. We used to win the match in three to four days. There was no compulsion for the teams to change the combination.

SJ: India lost abroad at the time. Ajit Wadekar and Mohammad Azharuddin set a plan for winning at home, but it seemed to be a short-term strategy. You were not developing the third or fourth fast bowler for when you went abroad.

JS: We paid some penalty there, I suppose. We won all the matches here, but when we went abroad our batsmen couldn't adjust and our bowling wasn't that effective. The spinners struggled at times and the fast bowlers couldn't hit the right line and length. We didn't tour that often during those days, especially between 1993 and 1996. But the confidence of winning at home was so big that we would return from a bad tour and we were extremely good the next week, which covered up everything. That was one of the reasons why we couldn't win consistently abroad.

SJ: You bowled in partnership with Venkatesh Prasad in England and South Africa. You and Prasad would come on and make early inroads and go away after your first or second spells. There was no good third seamer. How did that affect the team's performances and how did it affect you?

JS: That was an eye-opener for me, the South Africa tour and the 1996 England tour. I realised that if we do not have three to four good fast bowlers, we would not be able to make a difference. We might bowl one odd good spell. But if you really want to keep pegging away and picking wickets, you need four good fast bowlers. We changed [the third seamer] quite a bit. Paras Mhambrey Salil Ankola, Prashant Vaidya came and went. When Zaheer [Khan] and Ashish [Nehra] started coming up, I could see how significant it was to have three to four good fast bowlers operating.

If you don't have a good third seamer, you will struggle because you will have to bowl more overs. Wicket-taking bowlers are reduced to filling up the overs for the team. You don't want to be a fill-up bowler when you are yearning to get a few wickets when you are fresh and ready to go. By the tea break, you are already knackered because you have put in 17-18 overs.

SJ: Every time India needed a wicket in South Africa, the captain brought you on. You didn't have much time between your spells. And then you couldn't go to West Indies due to the shoulder injury. How much did that tour take a toll on you?

JS: Exhaustion is a part of a fast bowler's career. When you bowl 20-22 overs in a day, you are exhausted at the end of the day. That is not an issue. Unfortunately, I picked up a shoulder injury. When you play for a side and the captain goes to you for a wicket, you are proud of it. You look up to such captains. However, it happened that I ended up bowling the maximum overs. I enjoyed every over that I bowled in South Africa. There were wickets, there was good intention behind every ball. I was learning every over I bowled.

SJ: Towards the end of your career, you developed variations. You bowled slower ones and the ones that left the right-hander. How did you go about developing those?

JS: I wish I had those variations a little early. Once we started to see the videos and we had access to all the pictures, it made a big difference. The correction happened immediately. All of a sudden, you know where to bowl. Analysts would look at the specifics to tell us the right way to go about it. The game changed completely. We had a more concrete approach.

SJ: How difficult was it to come back from those injuries?

JS: It was tough, in the sense you weren't sure you will be able to bowl in the same way again. The shoulder is a 360-degree rotating body part. The one good thing that happened was that I was in the best hands - the South African doctor Mark Ferguson did a fantastic job.

I went back to engineering college, finished my three subjects and got my degree. I came back to sports again, although I lost a bit of pace. That was going to happen when my joints were altered. It was quite a challenging moment, a doubtful moment. Like anybody, I was a little insecure. However, I was able to manage, be practical, and it helped me.

SJ: There are a good number of Indian fast bowlers who came through in the last 15 years, but none had a career as long or productive as Zaheer Khan. Was there one that you thought was going to have a long career but did not?

JS: Oh, plenty! I thought Ashish Nehra would be a great resource. He had everything, but he had a very uncertain body. He got injured every now and then. His body alignment wasn't really good. His hip and knee joint were not in the right line. His ankle was injured a lot of times.

I appreciated Salil Ankola - a strong lad, but somehow he couldn't stick for long. And then, I had some hopes from Pankaj Singh from Rajasthan. Another talent that missed the bus was Harvinder Singh from Amritsar. He was a rapid fast bowler and was a treat to watch running in. He played a couple of Test matches and was gone.

I don't know what happened to them. It all boils down to confidence when they are in a Test match. It is quite tough to reinforce yourself on Indian wickets when you see the spinners take all the wickets. You have to succeed now and then. If you don't, the confidence erodes and you make way for someone else.

SJ: When Zaheer and Nehra came in, you were a big brother to them. When you retired, I remember Nehra said he would miss seeing you standing at mid-off/mid-on telling him what to do. When you came in, was that kind of mentorship available?

JS: There are two ways of looking into it. One is that you can seek information and knowledge from others. The other is knowledge coming to you. Both have advantages and disadvantages. If you keep going to the mid-on/mid-off fielder and ask them what to do, unless you have a great rapport with them [it won't work]. You should be sharp enough to watch and understand what is going on and implement it yourself. Self-learning is probably the best way to go forward. Yes, outside knowledge is important if you are getting the right kind of knowledge from the people around you. If you don't get that knowledge, it doesn't mean that you can blame them that that knowledge was not passed on to you. You should step up and get the knowledge for yourself. That makes you an even better bowler.

SJ: Ishant Sharma has already played 65 Tests. That is only two short of your entire career, and he is only in his mid-20s. By the time you had played 65 Tests, you understood fast bowling. We are just about seeing him understand his game. Where do you think his development as a fast bowler has slowed down?

JS: I think various formats have slowed down [the development of] many fast bowlers in India. When you are a fast bowler, you bowl with certain pride. That pride is gone for a toss in T20s. You end up giving 40 to 45 runs or even more. You are not very instrumental in winning matches. If you go by the ratio, in every 20 games the bowlers are going to win one game for you. It is absolutely a batsman-oriented game. That has been the most celebrated format in the last ten years, or from the time IPL came into existence. The batsmen have seen bowlers getting hammered for runs. The game has become very positive from a batsman's perspective, whereas for the bowlers they have gone into a shell.

Irrespective of which format you play, you want to be tested as a bowler. That doesn't happen in T20s and ODIs. That can only happen in Test cricket. With so much cricket being played, you don't have enough experience in those five-day matches. All of a sudden, when you are put into a five-day match, you struggle. You don't know anything about a third spell when you are bowling the 19th over at the end of the day. That is the most difficult spell to bowl. Not only Ishant Sharma, most bowlers have been caught in that predicament, where they find it hard to manage all three formats of the game.

SJ: How much of a role does that play - going from one format, where you bowl longer spells and lot more overs, to ODIs and T20s? Not just in terms of your bowling skills and knowledge but also in terms of the toll it takes on your body?

JS: I understand a lot of planning is required, but it is a profession for all of us, so you have to manage. It is about how far we can go and how strong you are and how long you are going to last. Commercial [aspects] also play a role in your mind. One of the formats will always take a beating. Here, unfortunately, Test cricket has taken a beating with respect to [Indian] fast bowlers.

SJ: In the 2003 World Cup, India got into good form after losing the early round-robin game to Australia. And then you faced Australia in the final. The Indian bowling came together as a unit, the batting did well, Sachin Tendulkar was in great form. What were your memories of the World Cup?

JS: Speaking from the fast bowling aspect, we had a great combination. Ashish was brilliant. Zaheer was too good. Everything fell in place. For the first time, we bowlers sat together and looked at videos. We had our own team meetings and made strategies. We understood the weaknesses of the batsmen and we worked on it. We were so happy. The plans were so specific and tailor-made for each batsman and we knew what we were doing. We exercised complete control over the opponents, especially our bowling department. The wickets in South Africa were good and the batting complemented us. We won a few games [with our bowling] and we were cruising.

The only thing was that Australia were playing cricket at a whole different level. They were at least four to five notches above any other side in the tournament. We had no answers to them. Maybe in the final - this is a very hindsight view - we could have batted first. I didn't bowl well in the final. Maybe I was overawed, but I could not perform well for the side. I came back to the dressing room and said to the guys that I didn't do justice to what I have been doing all the time. Except for the final, we had a great run.

SJ: When you look back at your career for India and for Karnataka, are you a satisfied man?

JS: Oh yes. I knew my end was coming. I could not have played any more cricket in India, because I didn't have the pace to bowl on Indian wickets. I could have played abroad for a couple of years, but then, the on and off wasn't the right thing to do and it didn't add to the build-up of a good team. Although I had one or two years of good cricket left in me, I decided that to be a complete cricketer, you need to have a body that responded to you. I didn't, and therefore had to quit.