As India remains under a 21-day lockdown all forms of sporting activities have come to a standstill but for the academies of ace cricketers Mahendra Singh Dhoni and Ravichandran Ashwin it seems business as usual.
According to a report on Times of India accessed via IANS, the MS Dhoni Cricket Academy is offering live classes on Facebook for its students over the past week. The classes, though, are not offered by Dhoni but by the regular coaches in the academy.
Ashwin’s academy, on the other hand, is a different story as the off-spinner is engaging directly with the young cricketers and is giving them tips over video calls himself to keep them in practice during the crisis which has stopped all forms of cricket.
The report has quoted Satrajit Lahiri – a coach of Dhoni’s academy and a former first-class cricketer – who said that the online classes are garnering widespread views and each of their tutorials is being viewed by almost ten thousand people.
Lahiri says they are using an app ‘Cricketor’ wherein they upload their demo drills. “The trainees also need to upload their videos so that we can keep a tab on their activities. We give feedback accordingly.”
The batsmen, in these training sessions, are required to throw balls against a wall and play with soft hands, while the bowlers are needed to shadow practice various drills to monitor their actions and loading-up positions.
Other platforms such has Ludimos and video-calling apps Zoom or Google Classrooms are being used by various other people and coaching institutes to provide online cricket training.
All cricketing activities remain suspended in the country due to novel coronavirus outbreak which has so far claimed more than 200 lives in the country.
The IPL 2020, which was scheduled to be played from March 29, has been postponed to April 15 due to the COVID-19 pandemic which has already affected more than 7,400 people and killed over 200 in India.
With India in the middle of a lockdown till April 14 in an attempt to curb the spread of the novel coronavirus, IPL 2020 has been subjected to an existential crisis as the April 15 is unlikely to happen. An official statement is still awaited.
(With IANS inputs)