Karthik performs special wicket keeping drills; Pant impresses with bat at nets

PERTH, Oct 29: At 37, Dinesh Karthik could well be playing his last ICC tournament, having been a part of global event squad for the first time back in 2007.
At 25, Rishabh Pant has years of top flight cricket left in him. He batted from start to finish during the nets but a place in the playing eleven still looks like a distant reality.
Both are at different stages of their lives — Karthik doing some special ‘blind drills’ so that people don’t criticise his keeping in what could be his last big tournament.
In case of Pant, there was passion and anger of a youth in his batting session as Rahul Dravid spent the maximum time looking at his batting.
On one of the coldest days in Perth, the focus of India’s net session was Karthik’s unique keeping drills under supervision of fielding coach T Dilip. Blind drill is a specific keeping exercise done to increase alertness as keepers get blindsided by batters when the ball comes to them at last the moment.
Dilip kept a couple of red and white markers at least four feet apart and put a white towel on them. As Karthik crouched behind the imaginary stumps, Dilip from the other kept an inclined plane used for giving sharp catches and hit the balls between the two road markers and in a manner that it gets deflected by the towel.
The towel is like a batter covering the ball, and even if he misses, the keeper would spot the delivery at the last moment.
This training is specially done to get the reflexes in order if someone like an Axar Patel, who bowls his deliveries at a quicker pace. The drill has two-fold benefits – it helps in making the reflexes quick and improves footwork.
The second set of the drill was with the big kit-bag after removing the marker.
Now Dilip was hurling the ball down the leg-side and a crouched Karthik needed deft footwork even if he is wrong-footed and gather the wide leg-side balls when bowlers lose their line.
Later, Karthik practiced catches off awkward edges.
Here, the team used a special rubber bat with rough and rugged edges. The moment the ball hits those rugged cuts, it could fly in any direction – inside edge, outside edge, lob on-front or just nosedive.
Coach Rahul Dravid had instructed net bowlers (spinners) to bowl fast and quick into the stumps when Karthik was keeping.
“We got an instruction from Indian coaches to flight it less and bowl fast and keep it within stumps without much turn for Karthik to keep. We are not used to bowling this quick in Grade cricket but it was good fun,” said one of the net bowlers Khilesh.
As Karthik did his drills, Pant batted and batted at the other nets. After the two-hour session, when everyone thought he was packing his kits, he took out his keeping gear and asked Nuwan Senaviratne to give him throwdowns for 15 minutes. (PTI)