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'India is like an empty canvas'

You do not, I learnt from earlier experience, 'interview' Greg Chappell if you want to get him at his best.

Ask him questions, and his answers are crisp and to the point; against that, cue cricket, get out of his way and let him freewheel on the subject of the game he once played with distinction and now makes a career teaching, and the floodgates open wide; the words flow free and unfettered.

Thus it was at the Oasis restaurant, in Hotel Park Plaza, Jaipur, last week when we met the Rajasthan Cricket Association's new head coach, and his friend and coaching aide de camp Ian Frazer, for dinner.

The meal lasted a little over three hours; for the duration, the tape recorder was on as Chappell and Frazer spoke, with the barest modicum of nudging, on a wide range of topics linked by the common thread of cricket.

A full transcript of that conversation would be close to book length; what follows are excerpts chosen for their relevance to Chappell's, and Frazer's, current assignment. (A word of warning before you read on - even in drastically excerpted form, this extends to over 7,000 words, and is clearly not aimed at those who prefer their sound bytes in little bubbles):

Q: The announcement that you were to take over as head coach at the RCA came to all here as a total surprise. How did it happen?

GREG: It goes back to the Champions' Trophy last year, when the Indian team was here, and we practiced at the Academy facilities. Lalit (Modi, president of the RCA) was very proud of what he was building here, and spoke to us about his vision for Rajasthan cricket.

At that stage, neither Ian nor I were auditioning for a job - we already had one, with the Indian team. So we spoke without restraint, from the heart if you will, we spoke very openly. We told him it was all very well to build this great edifice -- but an academy is not about bricks and mortar, it is about the programs that you put into place. We discussed this at some length with Lalit at the time.

After the World Cup, I quit my post as national coach and went back to Australia.

After some time, Lalit contacted me and asked if I would take up a full time job running the academy. By then I had accepted some other opportunities, and quite honestly I didn't want a full time job. I told him if you are serious about it, I will discuss it with Ian, and see what we can do - probably work something out that involved us being there for a part of the time.

This was somewhere in June, July, and after a while Lalit got back to us and said it sounds good, let's do it.

What does 'let's do it' mean, anyway? So we talked a bit more. I told him if he was looking for a me-too academy, we were not interested-- but if he was interested in doing something special, and if he wanted to get out of our way and let us do it, then we were up for it.

We told him also that nothing could happen overnight; that we could work six months in the year in India and it would take the better part of three years to set things up, put programs in place, coach the coaches, evaluate the talent...

Lalit got back to us and said he was very interested in a project on those lines. We discussed terms, we finally arrived at some figures that suited both of us, and sometime in the second or third week of September, we agreed in principle, and decided to start in October.

Within a week, Ian got here; a week later I came down as well. The first program started on October 2, so it was a very rapid turnaround, actually. It was quite hectic; there was a lot of planning involved. We put together a lot of material on what we wanted to do, that we passed on to Lalit over the internet, before the final agreement was reached.

You have coached a national team, we read of various offers that had your name attached to it, we read that you were in discussions with the Australian cricket academy... And then you end up in Rajasthan, a state that is not in the top tier at the domestic level, even. What attracted someone like you to a project like this?

GREG: Many things, actually. There were some offers and opportunities in Australia, but quite honestly Australian cricket is okay. You could say some things could be done differently, but by and large, Australian cricket is planning and preparing as well as anyone can. You could possibly make a difference, but that difference would be merely incremental.

India on the other hand is virgin territory, an empty canvas in the sense that there is not a lot of planning going into it. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of interest in the big picture. Lalit had some vision and, in building the academy, he had shown a commitment to that vision. While we didn't agree with everything he said when we first talked, the fact that he had a vision, which is rare in Indian cricket, mattered. It meant that he was someone we could work with.

Another important consideration is this, that India is the epicenter of world cricket. It does not matter whether we think everything is going well with Indian cricket or no; the fact remains that there is no other country that can support the worldwide game, like India can. To be quite honest, I think cricket around the world has got some serious problems, and unless somebody outside of Australia shows some vision and sense of purpose, the game is on a downward spiral it cannot recover from.

Rajasthan does not have a cricket history, as you pointed out - but that is actually an advantage in a project like this. There is no group of people here who think they know everything, and therefore there are no outsiders coming in to tell you how they think things should be done.

That is actually a big problem with coaching-- people tend to think on conventional lines, and want to do things they way it's always been done. That is a prescription for disaster.

Why just cricket--look at an Infosys, for example, or a Tata or a Mittal, look at companies that are having a major impact around the world, and you will realize that if they were doing business the same way they did ten years ago, they wouldn't have achieved what they in fact have. It is no different in cricket - if Indian cricket is to go forward, you have to look at things in a different way.

So this assignment actually gives us an opportunity to introduce new ways of thinking, without outside interference. It is an opportunity to work with promising raw material, on a clean canvas; there wasn't going to be a lot of vested interests that were going to step in our way - and that situation is ideal.

It is on these lines of thought that we put together the basic program. The blueprints we looked at included some of those companies I mentioned, it included soccer in Brazil, tennis in the Eastern Bloc nations, music...