Coming back to life

It has been drizzling every day for the last week in Bangalore. The Cubbon Road, separating the peaceful Cubbon Park from the usually peaceful Chinnaswamy Stadium, is full of usual activity. There are protesters outside the Mahatma Gandhi Park, traffic policemen hiding around a bend to catch those jumping signals, and commuters creating a traffic jam around the bus stop outside the stadium. Behind where the policemen lean against their bikes is the wall of the Chinnaswamy B ground, which is used by the National Cricket Academy (NCA). On the other side of the wall rehabilitates India's best bowler, Zaheer Khan, after yet another injury has cost him yet another Test series, in Sri Lanka this time.

The injured body part is the same shoulder that was operated on two years ago. A muscle in that shoulder is strained, and needs strengthening. Braving that niggle is possible but can lead to a major injury. Zaheer is now mature enough to know exactly how much he can get out of his body. His ongoing rehab shows that same sense of awareness of his body.

Zaheer has been working at the NCA for close to four weeks, but this is only his ninth or tenth bowling session. Every step on the field is measured. Not one movement is wasted. He has brought himself to bowl six to eight overs in a session now. "When I started bowling here, I was getting really tired after bowling one over," Zaheer remembers. Now, he manages more than one over at a stretch, but soon sits on his haunches, constantly in conversation with Sudarsan VP, the NCA trainer, who is like his shadow.

Zaheer wants the experts by his side. "It's always tough to get that bowling fitness up," he says. "You know you have been away from the game, you have damaged a muscle or a joint, so you kind of need to start slowly. That's why you need these physios and experts around to guide you through the process. It's important to follow the regime the experts ask you to."

It is a mundane and frustrating process that calls for a lot of patience. Sometimes a bowler in rehab doesn't even have batsmen to bowl to. Zaheer has been lucky to have Robin Uthappa and Sreesanth, coming back from injuries themselves, for company. Zaheer likens the process of resuming bowling after a long gap to running again.

"If you haven't run for a long time, the first day is tough," he says. "When you start slowly, and you build the volume of it, that's exactly how you go about it with the bowling. You build the workload slowly.

"Because you are missing cricket, and you are not playing at the highest level, that frustration is there. Once you start getting back, you start bowling, you again start to enjoy the whole thing. It's a process you need to go through. At the same time you need to be patient. It is important that when you are injured, you take your time. Because you need to start at the level where you left the game."

Those last few words are crucial. In Zaheer's decade-long career, he has had to take care of injuries as much as he has minded the shine on the ball. After the first of those setbacks, he didn't quite resume at the level where he had left the game. Everything was bright and sunny for him at the start of the Australian summer of 2003-04. Then struck the first major injury of his career, initially a hamstring and later discovered to be a nerve twitch.

The man who returned wasn't quite the Zaheer that had begun to evoke Wasim Akram. The next year or so was in-and-out. Everything was questioned: his attitude, fitness, hunger. He was criticised for trying to play through pain, he injured himself again during the Pakistan tour later that year, and his stint as an unpaid amateur for Surrey ended prematurely.

Zaheer remembers his frustrations well. "The root cause of injuries was not found then," he says. "I would work on a certain muscle and come back into the game, start playing matches, and some other muscle would go. It took me a while to come out of it.

"Every time you go back into the international matches, and you break down, that definitely puts you down in terms of confidence. I am glad the way I responded to it. It was a tough year and a half, but I came out a better bowler from that."

Dion Nash, who faced more injuries than Zaheer, explained that phase of coming back from mystery injuries more articulately. "When you first have a back injury - at least my experience is this - I really didn't know quite what was wrong. I could run, I could jump, I could dive. The moment I tried to bowl there were problems. It's hard enough to explain to yourself. To get a coach or manager to understand it is even harder."

Once he understood what the problem was, Zaheer says, it wasn't much of a bother. "Cutting short my run-up had been on my mind for a long time, I wanted to try that. But because of the hectic international season, I wasn't finding time. When I was out of the team, I could go back to first-class cricket and shorten my run-up."

The injuries by then had troubled Zaheer for too long to let the fast bowler's ego interfere with cutting down the run-up. "The run-up I had, even though it was long, I wasn't getting much out of it. So it was a wise thing to do." The new, cold, calculating Zaheer was now ready to come back.

Ironically the final touches to the comeback came in England, where he had left a county side high and dry not long ago. "I bowled plenty of overs for Worcestershire in that season. There I had a better understanding of my body also, in terms of preparation for the game, in terms of handling the long season and stuff.

"It is just the workload in terms of bowling, the travelling, the surroundings, are completely different. You are in completely different environments. Every second day you are on the ground playing matches. You get to bowl in good conditions, and because you are bowling long spells, you tend to learn more." Ironically, again, his partner-in-rehabilitation, Sreesanth, is one of the few been barred by the BCCI from playing county cricket.

Sreesanth was also Zaheer's partner when the latter completed his comeback in South Africa. Zaheer's bowling partners changed over the next two years - Ishant Sharma, RP Singh, Munaf Patel - but he became the true leader of the attack, bowling well in all conditions and with all three balls - SG, Duke, Kookaburra. The new Zaheer was a more complete bowler. He was almost a bowling captain, standing at mid-on, setting fields for Ishant, and Praveen Kumar in limited-overs games, seeing them through tough spells.

In October 2008, when Zaheer and Ishant blew the Aussies away with early reverse-swing, on a pitch that the other team struggled to take wickets, many termed them the best new-ball pair then. An injury could not have been too far away.

Duly Zaheer injured his shoulder in the next year's IPL, and is yet to fully recover, with just six months to go the World Cup. He doesn't want to talk about those days now. "All I want to do is just focus on my bowling. Regain my bowling fitness. What has happened in the past has happened."

It's not just him, though. While he has been gone, India's pace resources have been exposed. Replacements are not to be found. As Zaheer plans another comeback, which should begin in the Champions League in South Africa, he knows it is not just a bowler but also the leader of the pack that India need. And as he tries to get back to "the level where he left the game at", India know he can't come back soon enough.