Joe Dawes fears for seamers' workload

Joe Dawes, India's former bowling coach, has asked for India to manage the workloads of their fast bowlers better, and also called for better communication between the national team management and the rest of the cricket set-up. During his time as India's bowling coach, Dawes felt there was no coordination between the national team and the bowlers' other teams - state as well as IPL.

Dawes also told ESPNcricinfo that the team management discussed the possibility of having Rahul Dravid as an intermediary between the national team and the rest of the set-up.

One of the big problems, Dawes said, was that if the national team wanted a bowler rested, they could only tell the concerned bowler and not ask for him to be pulled out of a first-class or an IPL match, or an international tour. He said there were only certain times when the communication was good, as just when they had started to build a good bond with the coaches at the National Cricket Academy (NCA), their roles were changed.

Dawes also hinted that during the controversial last year-and-a-half of the last BCCI regime, the otherwise good communication channel between the team management and administrators became chaotic.

"We started building a really good relationship with the NCA guys, but then some changes were made there, which I don't actually know a lot about," Dawes said. "We were starting to develop a good bond between the national team and the NCA, but then they moved on to other jobs.

"There was talk at various times where we would have loved as a group to have a Rahul Dravid maybe in that (go-between) role. There was plenty of times when we had really good communication. None of my business what has gone on in the last 18 months, but that has obviously thrown the whole shebang into chaos. Didn't really know what was going on. Prior to that we had pretty good information flow because of the relationship between Mr Srinivasan and the team management."

Dawes' biggest concern is bowlers being over-bowled. He cited the match between Delhi Daredevils and Kings XI Punjab - the team Dawes works with in the IPL - as an example, singling out the workload of Parwinder Awana.

"I mean, I have watched (Parwinder) Awana here," Dawes said. "In the four years that I have worked with him, he has gone from 140 - early 140s - in his first IPL to this year when he is so tired from a big year of bowling where he is down to 130 at best. He has lost his zip. That's about being managed, about being rested at the right time, about him taking ownership and doing the work that is needed, and not bowling in between matches."

When told that the domestic schedule allows only a three-day gap between seven back-to-back first-class matches, Dawes said he didn't know much that went on behind the scenes, but that a bowler once told him that him he was considered as displaying bad attitude when he told his state association that he did not want to bowl in a certain match. Dawes refused to name that bowler.

Dawes said bowlers needed to be given 12-month plans, the kind of which Mitchell Johnson has come to IPL with. He has been told exactly how many balls he can bowl on which day and exactly how he has to gradually build up his workload keeping in mind the Test tours of the West Indies and England just after the IPL. India, on the other hand, have no such plans during the IPL, which is often followed immediately by important Test tours.

"If there is no cricket or a small tour after the IPL, let him play the IPL," Dawes said. "And look at resting him for that small tour. That way you build a bigger pool of bowlers. But if you are going straight into an England tour, it would make sense to rest them somewhere along the line and give them a chance to get their body right to go on a big tour like that."

Both in 2011 and 2014, just before going on big overseas tours, India didn't rest any player during the IPL. India lost all eight away Tests in 2011, and after taking lead in England last year, their bowlers ran out of steam.

"I think they got tired," Dawes said, advocating even financial compensation so that a bowler can be rested for the IPL if a big tour is to follow. "Bhuvneshwar hurt his ankle, lost a bit of his sting. Ishant got injured. We lost him for the next two Test matches.

"Then we had that third Test and we dropped Alastair Cook on the first morning. Jaddu (Ravindra Jadeja) dropped him, I think. We were on top at that point. If you speak to the England guys and their dressing room, they say they could physically feel the change in their room when he got dropped. Because he was under pressure, his team was under pressure. If you have the captain under pressure, you are in a good position, and we let him off."

The Lord's win was a high point of Dawes' time with India, but the side became jaded in the rest of the series to lose 3-1. That brought a sudden end to Dawes' and fielding coach Trevor Penny's association with the team. Dawes doesn't want to talk about those times, but did mention he was given no reason for replacing him. However, he said the relationship between him and the bowlers, and also him and his replacements continues to be good. In the IPL, Dawes works with Sanjay Bangar and R Sridhar in the Kings XI set-up.

"I was only talking to Sanjay Bangar today, the things we achieved, the friendships we made, the progress we made with that bowling group, pretty happy with that," Dawes said.

"The improvement that Ishant made, came back into international cricket, stamped himself as a world-class bowler. More importantly, for me, he stamped himself at the leader of the attack, and started to look after that group and drive it. That is something I hope, I believe, I had a hand in. Pretty proud of that."