India camp hits high intensity

Friday at the Chinnaswamy Stadium was the machinery-oiling day. On the second day of their pre-season conditioning camp in Bangalore, India's ODI players went through a thorough welcome back after their seven-week break - their tired faces and panting bodies on a pleasant Bangalore day suggested as much. There was not much out of the ordinary - just a good old-fashioned workout on their physical strength, fielding, batting and bowling.

It will be easy in the current climate to read too much into the tennis serves that coach Gary Kirsten made all the batsmen bat against. The recent and much-recorded trouble of the batsmen against short bowling notwithstanding, this has been a regular exercise at India camps. Last year, before the home series against Australia, and also in the camp leading into the New Zealand tour, Kirsten employed the exercise. He literally serves - from about 18 yards - a ball that looks like a tennis ball but harder. Only recently, in the World Twenty20, the batsmen were found wanting against the short stuff.

The ball either bounces awkwardly into the ribs or - if there is some slice put to it - swings away from a right-hand batsman prodigiously. Those sliced serves were not very frequent today. On an adjoining concrete track at the National Cricket Academy, Robin Singh, the fielding coach, waited with throwdowns, all rising into the ribs and higher. Today was also the first time in close to two years that Rahul Dravid trained with the Indian ODI team.

Kirsten had, before the start of this camp, spoken about short-pitched bowling: "In terms of our gameplans, our training, our structures, we try and cover every base that we need to make sure we give ourselves best chance of success. That might be one of it, but there might be a whole lot others."

That was the theme of the camp today, albeit with a slightly sharpened focus on the shorter stuff. Apart from that, there were two tracks that the batsmen batted on: one a spicy pitch that helped the net bowlers turn the ball a long way, and the other, a friendlier surface where the India bowlers bowled.

The nets, though, started in the afternoon, after a two-hour fielding-cum-fitness session in the morning, at the main ground. After warm-ups and football games, the team was divided into the groups of five as Kirsten, Robin and Paddy Upton, the mental conditioning coach, worked on various aspects of their fielding. The work on physical strength included games of badminton, which some of them played after finishing nets.

The camp will go on for two more days, before they disperse to play for their respective companies in the BCCI's Corporate Trophy.