The stumps are demarcated by a cone at either end. For the fast men, four cones are placed to demarcate a corridor ahead of the stumps; if you land it within those cones, you have hit the good length, on line of off or just outside.

The fast men line up; the one with the ball runs in and bowls, with the object being to get the ball through the demarcated channel, at the best speed they are capable of.

It is their first attempt at this exercise, and it shows. Some are wayward; others concentrate on landing in the channel, at the expense of rhythm and consequently, pace.

Frazer takes each bowler aside, when needed, to apply gentle correctives. "Don't worry about aiming the ball between the cones," he tells one errant quick bowler. "The ball should go into the channel naturally, because of your action and release. Run in and bowl as naturally as you can - if you do it right, the ball will go where you want it to." There are little tips, when needed, on the gather; on building momentum through the run up and transferring it, in the jump, into the release.

As the session extends, improvement begins to show; more bowlers are getting the ball through the channel, more times, and as they get it right and confidence builds, the action smoothens, their pace picks up till, towards the end, a few of the wards are eliciting applause from their mates, and the coaches, with each delivery.

On the other side of the indoor facility, Chappell places a small steel bucket in what would, for a batsman, be fractionally short of good length. The goal, he tells his wards, is to flight and loop the ball, and get it into the bucket - for a reward of 100 bucks each time they get it right.

"If you hit that length," he tells his wards, "the batsman will be drawn forward, but the ball will pitch just in front of him, and be turning already when he meets it with his bat. That is what you want to do - give him a fuller length and he will drive you, bowl shorter, and he will go back and cut or pull. You want him pushing forward without quite getting to the pitch."

One by one, the wards give it a go; Chappell interjects the word in season where necessary. "That was good," he tells a left arm chinaman bowler, "but you will do better with a bit of overspin, see, this is how you do it." "You are pausing before delivering the ball, and that means you won't get your body fully into the ball. Look, see, when you land the back leg, you have to set up a strong base, you have to load that leg, and drive off it with the body so all your energy is going forward, into the ball."

Frazer and Chappell have a local coach each alongside them, to translate these concepts into Hindi; through the session, you notice that the two coaches keep their intervention to a minimum, let the kids work things out for themselves, and step in only when they can fine tune something.

"We only did a half hour of bowling," Chappell points out after the session, "but the trick to this is to give them only so much information they can absorb at any one time. Today, the fast bowlers worked on their release - though we didn't make a lecture about it. They learnt to put it all together - the run up, the jump, the gather, the release, all the bits and pieces coming together towards the goal of hitting the absolute perfect length and line. "They need to learn variation, and various other aspects of the craft, but that will come later - for now, they developed an important skill set, and the confidence that they can do it, and that is just the right dose for one session.

"With the spinners, too, we were teaching an important aspect of the craft. Not the length, so much, though that is important - the real key was putting the mechanics of their delivery together in such a way that they achieved the objective of making the batsman play and miss. As you noticed, early in the session they were aiming for the bucket, but towards the close, they were just bowling, like they would in a match situation - and once their action smoothed out and they began bowling freely, they began hitting the bucket two times out of three.

"The next time we have a bowling session, we will warm them up by letting them do what they did today, then we will nudge them into working on another aspect of their bowling skills."