What No 1 allrounder teaches kids: Street-smart cricket

The world’s No 1 all-rounder decimates a top-notch England Test team claiming 28 wickets and scores four crucial fifties in a gruelling five-Test series at home. A day later he turns up at 6:30 am at the RKM Ground in T Nagar and plays rhombus cricket (tennis ball) with teenagers at the GenNext Cricket Academy, which is run by his father N Ravichandran.
That’s R Ashwin for you: He eats, drinks and sleeps cricket, besides dreaming the game with youngsters. The India star then has a mentoring session with his wards. The best off-spinner in the world is eager to share his knowledge.

Not many cricketers of his generation have donned the hat of a coach or a mentor actively while playing the game at the highest level. But Ashwin does it with passion and he wants to "make a difference" to the coaching methods in the city.
Ashwin, who has 451 international wickets in his kitty, terms coaching as a "learning" process. "I would like to give back something to a youngster from my experience. When the kids ask questions, in the process, I also learn a few things," Ashwin tells TOI as he is surrounded by kids at his academy two days after India’s Test win over Bangladesh.
Ashwin is known to be generous with his knowledge. A recent beneficiary was young Bangladesh off-spinning allrounder Mehedi Hasan. After Bangladesh’s defeat, Ashwin had a chat with the 19-year-old Bangla spinner. "He has a lot of experience in the last couple of years and he’s a very successful bowler. It was very useful for me," Hasan said.
P Srinivasan, who has been working with Ashwin on his batting and is one of the coaches at the T Nagar academy, says interacting with kids helps Ashwin to de-stress and re-energize. "Ashwin wants kids to learn how to play street-smart cricket. At GenNext, we are trying to produce situation-oriented cricketers. In other academies, the individuality gets lost due to stereotyped coaching methods. Here we try to back the natural abilities of a player along with strong basics," says the 42-year-old coach Srinivasan.
"For example, Ashwin would ask an off-spinner to bowl from different points in the crease (behind and in front). He would suddenly ask him to bowl leg-spin. He asks kids to try various things and observe batsmen closely. He wants kids to learn how to find a way to overcome any situation and outsmart the opposition," said Srinivasan.
With 110 children training in the academy, Srinivasan said what is needed for GenNext is not just cricketing skills but life skills. "More than cricket, our focus is on making the boy a good athlete. If his motor skills are not great, then we make sure he improves in it in the next four to five months. We work on his vision and hand-eye coordination. We move towards result-oriented practice sessions."
"As a kid, you have to try out everything and understand what works for you. If you don’t try, you won’t know what works for you. One will be really good at sweeping, another at stepping out and hitting the same ball. A child has to try 10 different shots and find the four shots that work best for him. You have to give him the space to figure it out," he added.
D Sudarshan, CEO of the academy, says Ashwin himself has designed a manual for the students. "We have a process put in place by Ashwin. We have also embarked on global tours. We went to Dubai for a three-day clinic with ESN academy last December. As part of an exchange programme, we have a boy from Dubai here in Chennai training with us. We are also planning to touch base in US, Singapore and a few other countries," he said.
After a two-hour mentoring session, Ashwin, the professional cricketer, puts on his pads for a 75-minute batting session to counter the likes of Mitchell Starc and Nathan Lyon for the upcoming Australia series.