Ashwin wanted to retain No.1 allrounder position: G Jayakumar

Indian off-spinner Ravichandran Ashwin is currently the No.1 ranked Test all-rounder and his coach G Jayakumar said that he wants to retain the position as long as he can.

He didn’t have the best of starts to the year and was eager to change things. Ashwin, who used to train with his personal coach Sunil Subramaniam, began to undergo training under the supervision of Jolly Rovers coach G Jayakumar to particularly improve his batting.

“When we started training, his sole aim was to improve his batting. He was already the No.1 allrounder in the world and he wanted to retain that position. He was in search of a new stance and we worked together on it. He was standing at the crease with his shoulders open.”

“We corrected that a bit. We also worked on his backlift. I saw him putting these few changes in technique into practice on Saturday and I am really happy that our efforts at the nets bore fruit,” said Jayakumar.

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Jayakumar, who had worked with Indian opening batsman, Murali Vijay said that he used a similar coaching style with Ashwin. “We would practise for 2-3 hours every day . The way I used to train Vijay, I would follow a similar pattern as the basics remain the same. We also worked on his drives. That’s why you would see him driving a lot in his innings. We also focused on his running between the wickets at the nets,” Jayakumar said.

When asked about whether Ashwin was under pressure after being under-bowled in the IPL and World T20, he said, “I don’t know whether he was under pressure or not. But he used the break between the IPL and the West Indies series to improve his game. And the way he scored the century shows how strong he is mentally , especially when he was returning to cricket from a rough patch. Hopefully , he will now take a lot of wickets,” concluded Jayakumar.