India’s fielding coach, R Sridhar is a very happy man with the team’s fielding standards. One of the fittest sides in the world cricket right now, the Indian team has made a huge a difference in their games with their brilliant fielding.
The role of a fielding coach is to identify the players for specific positions in the field but the Indian fielding coach insisted that instead of preparing specialist fielders the team is trying to develop ‘multi-speciality fielders’ who can field at any position according to the situation.
Talking to journalists ahead of the second ODI game against New Zealand, Sridhar said:“In one-day cricket, the main challenge for any fielding team is to suffocate the batsmen and make them work really hard for their runs.”
“That’s where fielders like Manish (Pandey) and Virat and Ajju (Rahane) or even Rohit for that matter are really useful inside the circle. Axar(Patel) is also a part of this (group). But again, because they are also all-round in terms of their skills and their agility, once we get into the death overs, these are the guys who go out in the deep because they are also very, very safe pair of hands… and throw well.
“We try and develop multi-speciality fielders rather than sticking to specialist fielders. That is what the aim is for this fielding team which comes down from MS (Dhoni), Virat and Anil (Kumble) himself. (They) give equal importance to fielding as you would do to any other skill and try and create multi-specialist fielders wherein the team benefits in terms of different phases of the game.”
Apart from praising the good fielders in the team, he said that the Indian team is lucky to have fast bowlers who can field well. He praised Umesh Yadav for his athleticism and said that the pacer’s hard work during the practice session has made him set a benchmark in the field for the bowlers.
“We’re really blessed to have some fast bowlers in the team who are very good athletes. Umesh is obviously fabulous, he’s got a good arm and goes really well across the ground,” Sridhar said.
“Umesh is an exception in that terms. It is not just because of his athleticism that he is good, it is also the fact that he puts in quite a bit of yards during practice sessions in terms of his catching and fielding. That’s probably given him the edge and set a new benchmark as far as fast bowlers fielders are concerned,” he added.