'He bought new shoes with sharp spikes...: How Sachin got ex-IND spinner to replicate Warne ahead of iconic face-off
Amid Australia training with 'duplicate' Ashwin, a former India cricketer recalled that the legendary Sachin Tendulkar had done a similar ahead of his iconic face-off with Australia great Shane Warne.
A video of Australia's training session in Alur had gone viral a few days back. Having decided to skip the tour matches, which they criticised as "irrelevant", they held a training camp with doctored conditions at the KSCA stadium and roped in an unheralded India bowler from Gujarat, with uncanny similarities with Ravichandran Ashwin, to gear up for the Border-Gavaskar Test series. While Indian fans laughed it off with a few cricket experts saying, "Ashwin is already in their head", but a former India cricketer recalled that the legendary Sachin Tendulkar had done a similar ahead of his iconic face-off with Australia great Shane Warne.
The build-up around 1997/98 India versus Australia Test series was around the battle between Warne and Tendulkar. A week before the Test series opener in Chennai in March 1998, Laxman Sivaramakrishnan, an Indian leg-spin bowler, was called to a camp by Sachin to replicate Warne's deliveries and help him gear up for the match.
“Most people think about the exact purpose of those training sessions. I was never going to be replica of Shane Warne. But what worked for me was that I also had big leg-breaks. One can never replicate the other bowler," he recalled in his interview with Times of India.
Laxman admitted that unlike the present era, where video analysts play a huge role for a cricket team in studying the various techniques of the opposition player, they did not have many videos of Warne and hence the entire practice session and the recreation of Warne's actions were based on the "vivid descriptions" he recieved from Sachin.
“Those were the days when you didn’t have video analysts and exposure to the wide range of videos like you have now. We spoke a lot. He gave me feedback from his experience of facing Warne. Sachin very vividly described the pace off the pitch that Warne could generate. Also, he gave me a clear picture of the variation of pace, trajectory and angles Warne used. That’s how observant Sachin was. I just tried to implement that," he said.
Laxman further revealed that the focus was more on how Warne would make the most of the rough patches outside the leg stump and that Sachin specifically stressed on countering that.
“Sachin had bought new shoes with sharp spikes. He scratched the surface very hard and created the rough. The groundsman was not happy with what we were planning. So, we decided we will use just one pitch for the week-long session. By the third or fourth day, the pitch became very tough to bat on," he added.
He wanted to grow a range of shots that would target anything from fine-leg to mid-wicket. So, he wanted the paddle sweep, the generic sweep and the slog sweep. Those days, there was just one sweep played by batters around the world. It was the hard sweep towards square-leg. Sachin thought of the paddle sweep, that also cut out the risks playing from the rough. He would bat for an hour. It’s not the quantity of practice but the quality of it that matters most."
