UAE leave nothing to chance in search for improvement

All aspects of the UAE cricket team's performance are monitored, as the management staff find tangible ways of charting any improvements that can be made.

Peter Kelly, the strength and conditioning specialist, instructs the UAE squad at the ICC Academy in Dubai. Courtesy Emirates Cricket Board

DUBAI // When two UAE players dropped catches early in the first one-day international against Afghanistan on Friday, they knew they had nowhere to hide.

Gone are the good old days when the shame and annoyance at dropping a catch was fleeting, now they get exact feedback for what it costs the team.

All aspects of team performance are monitored, as the management staff find tangible ways of charting any improvements that can be made.

“If we can score 225 plus, then we have a really good chance because the average score against us is still only 228 to 230,” Aaqib Javed, the UAE head coach, said with remarkable precision last week.

These are the one-per-centers, the marginal gains that leading sports teams have been pursuing for years.

The UAE have cottoned on as they try to bridge the gap to the best ahead of next year’s World Cup.

The national cricket team, it is fair to say, is nothing like what it once was.

As recently as January, when they earned their World Cup place, they were basically just talented amateurs who devoted as much time to cricket as their jobs permitted.

They all still have day jobs, but they also have a team of specialists demanding they act and think as professionals.

There is no room for slacking, if they do the batting coach – or the head of sports science, or the high performance manager – can utilise data to show them that they have been, and by precisely how much.

Not that they like to criticise. Peter Kelly, a former professional rugby player who is the side’s strength and conditioning consultant, prefers to accentuate the positives.

He uses results from the squad’s YoYo predicted VO2 max testing as an example of the effort the UAE players are making. He reports that, since initial testing in June this year, the overall squad average for the distance covered in the gruelling aerobic test has improved by 538.7 metres.

That means, on average, players are running more than half a kilometre further during the intermittent recovery test.

Some, like Rohan Mustafa and Ahmed Raza, have always rated highly in athletic tests.

For others, the improvements made have been substantial.

Mohammed Tauqir, the 42-year-old spinner who had basically been retired for two years before returning to the game this summer, is one example.

“Tauqir was carrying a bit of extra timber when we first started,” Kelly said.

“He has lost over nine kilograms, really slimmed down and has really taken to training.

“Obviously he is one of the oldest and I think he realised that to compete with the younger guys he has to be up there.”

Having a New Zealander from a rugby background telling them what to do might have met with suspicion from players whose training was no more scientific than batting and bowling in the nets.

But Kelly said the players had appreciated having objective feedback and are enjoying seeing the difference it makes.

“When I came on board it was a learning period for me,” Kelly said. “I didn’t want to tell them they had to do this and they had to do that.

“We talked about it, slowly made changes. One part of my ethos is that I would definitely not ask any of the guys to do anything that I wouldn’t try to do myself.

“I get involved with the cricket as well, with the fielding, because I want to show that I am willing to embarrass myself, too, if it means improving as a person.”

Ahead of the series against Afghanistan, the UAE players spent some training sessions wearing heart-rate monitors.

It was part of Kelly’s plan to find ways of pushing the players further.

So if they said a drill was 10 out of 10 for toughness, for example, he would expect them to be working at 95 per cent of their maximum heart rate.

All of which matters for little if they then bowl a load of wides, and miss straight balls when they are batting, in games.

But the national team are hoping all the small parts of their development programme add up to a more significant whole.

“Our games against Pakistan A and New Zealand A provided us with valuable information on what our coaching and sports science teams need to focus on and fine tune,” said Will Kitchen, the UAE’s high performance manager.

“Against Afghanistan we will be on a more level playing field, so we expect to see vast improvements from the UAE players and the team as a whole.”

Follow us on twitter at @SprtNationalUAE