INTERVIEW with ATUL SHARMA

On the first day of the IPL, April 18, I Googled 'Atul Sharma'. Despite being listed in the Rajasthan Royals squad for the tournament, alongside Shane Warne and Dimitri Mascarenhas, there was no further information about him. On Indian fan forums, there was some buzz about rumours that Sharma could bowl 100 mph. But no one really knew anything.

Sharma, possibly the fastest bowler in the world, was still beneath the radar.

Sharma's life story is surely one of the most remarkable in cricket or any other sport. Now 23, at the start of the IPL he had not played a game of cricket - at any level - since he was 16 and yet had recently secured a professional contract with the reigning champions, arguably the biggest cricket club in the world.

Over that seven years, Sharma had, first, overcome a serious leg condition that threatened to end his dream before it had even started and then, working with a series of specialist coaches, attempted to turn himself from a middling schoolboy cricketer into a world-class fast bowler. Not just a world class fast bowler, but one who could bowl 100 mph deliveries at will.

Sharma had never been involved in any official coaching set-up. Simply, he was a determined teenager who had had a hunch that cricket was not making use of modern training techniques commonplace in other sports. His hunch was seemingly to be proved correct as, finally, he arrived, fully formed and utterly unknown at the doors of Shane Warne's IPL team.

Working independently with the help English fast bowling expert Ian Pont and the US-based Olympic javelin coach Jeff Gorsky, Sharma had undertaken a strength and conditioning regime alien even to top cricketers, while developing a curious-looking new action, in defiance of the cricket textbook. Though Pont - a longtime advocate of the maverick view that pace could actually be taught - had previously worked with Dale Steyn and Darren Gough, Sharma's slingy action had more in common with Lasith Malinga or Shaun Tait.

In the weeks building up to the IPL, a shoulder injury meant that the climax of Sharma's incredible journey - a professional debut - looked like being postponed. For weeks, even after the IPL had started, Sharma was recuperating and training alone at the Potchefstroom academy near Johannesburg. But in the first week of May, Sharma was finally ready to travel to the Royals' base in Cape Town, ready to begin the next phase of his amazing story.

Coming from nowhere to win a pro contract makes Sharma's story remarkable enough, even if he were never to take a wicket. But Sharma, articulate, affable and resolutely single-minded, is confident he can go further; indeed, confident that he can be the fastest bowler that India - and maybe even the world - has seen...

Q: Let's start at the end: how did the deal with the Rajasthan Royals come about?

Manoj Badale, the owner of Rajasthan Royals and the IPL commissioner, Lalit Modi, had seen clips of my action and were excited but it looked so revolutionary they didn't want any controversy. So they sent me to the Australian Institute of Sport in Brisbane. This was last December. The AIS is the authority on whether someone's action is within the laws. Shoaib Akhtar and Muralitharan went there. The IPL wanted my action tested and approved as 100 per cent legal in case anything came up in the tournament.

Greg Chappell, who's head of the AIS and involved with the Rajasthan Academy, was very happy: he said my fitness was a long way ahead of the AIS standards. And, because they knew I hadn't played any games and they wanted to see how I'd do bowling to a batsman. They had me bowling to Shane Watson who was man of the series in the last IPL: it was very good getting feedback from him. He thought I was fine.

Before I went to Australia, I wasn't in the Rajasthan Royals squad -1 was only a potential candidate. It was that trip, and what Greg Chappell and Shane Watson had to say, that got me into the squad.

Q: How did this whole story start for you?

I grew up in the suburbs of Mumbai and when I was 15 or 16,1 used to read a lot of cricket books, saying that fast bowlers are born not made and stuff like that. And I just thought with all the science and technology around nowadays, there might be another way. Advances were being made in other sports, in athletics, why not in cricket? Not that long ago, scientists used to think that running a four-minute mile was physically impossible, that you'd die or something. But now even semi-professional athletes can do it. Within athletics, there had been measurable progress. So that was the basic premise - to see if you could come at cricket-differently, by coming from a scientific point of view.

Q: Were you already a star player for your school or club side at this stage?

No. I was pretty tall and athletic but I wasn't the strongest or tallest kid in class. I knew people who were ten times as talented me and if a coach or a scout saw us together they would choose the other guy over me every time. But I'm not a big fan of talent. I believe talent is over-rated. I had decent fitness: my legs weren't skinny. I wasn't a weak kid. And I knew that if I worked could get fitter and stronger.

As a cricketer, I was promising. I was basically playing barefoot in the street with rubber balls and tennis balls: that is how things are in India.

Then I had problems with my legs: problems from trying to run in too fast to bowl like Waqar Younis. It was classified as compartment syndrome. I had surgery in India which they messed up really bad. The doctors told me there was no point thinking of playing cricket again because my legs were in such bad shape.

But now I look back and think it was best thing that ever happened to me. I started emailing doctors abroad asking if they could help me. One hospital in America said they would take on my case for free. I was willing to be a case study for their students: they said they'd never seen such a badly messed-up condition. So I went to Baltimore - and that was the turning point of my life. Coming from India, everything is 50 times more expensive in the US, so even if my parents had been millionaires there was no way we could have paid for treatment. But the doctors were really kind: they only charged me for X-rays and MRIs and I paid for those by working as a waiter in a restaurant.

I had something inside me telling keep on with my gym work, just hoping that one day I'd be able to run again. It took three years on and off to get me 100 percent right and give me the go-ahead to start running again. But I didn't see myself waiting tables for the rest of my life. There was no plan B. I wasn't at law school or anything. All my eggs were in one basket.

Q: The gap between where you were and where you were aiming for was huge...

Well, that's the problem with me: I don't take no for an answer! Come 2005-2006,1 was training again and ready to get back into cricket. In America I'd seen how baseball pitchers and footballers and javelin throwers trained and I wanted to see if I could mix and match those techniques with cricket. I'd been reading a lot of books about fast bowling and the one that made most sense to me was Ian Pont's Fast Bowlers Bible, which I had stumbled across on the web and read in a day. It made a lot of sense to me: I tried a couple of things from it but I had a hundred questions I wanted to ask him.

So I rang Ian from India on a payphone and fixed to go to England and see him for five days I'm sure Ian was surprised. No-one just goes round the world for two hours of coaching a day for a week. Ian didn't know at that stage whether I was a social cricketer or or whether I wanted to bowl 100 mph for India. I didn't tell him my ambitions at the first meeting because it would have looked kind of insane!

Q: What was his reaction when he first saw you bowl?

He wasn't blown away. It was winter - December 2006 - and we were indoors in Chelmsford without a long run-up. He could look at my action and delivery stride and I'd already copied most of his book, but I was not bowling as quick as I was going to. He gave me some drills and told me he was going to the MRF pace academy in Chennai with Essex in February 2007, where he said he'd have a second look at me and check on my progress. So we had another four or five days there, did some more work and decided that, after trying all kinds of actions, I accessed my power better sideways on rather than front on.

Then we thought about specialist training. I could either go in the direction of baseball or javelin. They both basically throw with a bent arm but javelin is throwing after a runup, which we decided was closer to cricket. A javelin weighs 8oog and the top guys throw it 90m - so I couldn't believe that if you could do that with a bent elbow, then you couldn't bowl a cricket ball, which is only 156g, at 100 mph. The power doesn't come from the elbow in javelin.

I contacted Jeff Gorsky, one of the best javelin coaches in the world, based in North Carolina. He's Polish and he works with America's No 1 javelin throwers. He made me take a strength and fitness test first to make sure it wasn't going to be a waste of his time. He said if you pass you can watch us and try and learn from us - if you're on a different level of fitness altogether then it's a waste of time my training with the javelin throwers. I wasn't giving him any money, so that was fair enough. Basically he had to fit me in. But when we met we just clicked. He never mentioned money; I stayed in his house for nearly a year; I became like a son to him.

Q: How did they test you at the start?

Well, they test your potential before you even get a javelin in your hand: basically, you are seen as a potential 90m javelin thrower if you can do a standing long jump that's 1.5 metres more than your height; that shows decent leg strength... there's a few tests. So once they know you are strong enough, they start to work on technique. But the base-point is whether you have the raw strength -which is different to cricket. Basically, javelin throwers work 20 times harder than cricketers. They do a lot of things that cricketers don't know about in terms of accessing power from different parts of the body - from your hips, from your chest - and there's a sequence and a pattern to how it all fits together.

We did a lot of basic old-school training, chopping wood and taking water from a well. We used the gym as well, but it was very functional: they train a lot of the smaller muscles. Often, cricketers work on the muscles you can see, whereas a lot of your power comes form the muscles you can't see.

Q: So you started to progress quite rapidly at this point?

It was all coming together and my arm speed was really increasing. We weren't working on line and length, only brute force, aiming to throw an object as fast and as far as possible. I mean I was bowling at stumps but I wasn't always successful. And I started being able to bowl the ball further and further and we started thinking, 'Well this looks quick by any standard.'

A lot more science has gone into javelin throwing than cricket fast bowling, because it's an Olympic sport: in Finland and Norway and the Czech Republic it's a national sport; it's really big and they have a lot of sports scientists looking at it. Logically, if there was a faster way of being able to throw something - or bowl something -javelin throwers should come across it before cricket coaches.

Q: So once you'd built up the right muscles, how did you get back into working on your cricket technique?

Now the aim was to get the ball down and be accurate. For accuracy we worked on the shape of my whole body during the action: where does my arm go, where does my leg go, where does the ball go. And I did this with Ian during 2008, the final leg, of getting the ball where I want it to go. So even if I bowl a wide I should know why. I want to understand how the bodyworks. Baseball pitchers and javelin throwers understand what they're doing, bio-mechanically - but then you see international bowlers bowl three consecutive wides down the leg side, which suggests they don't know what they're doing.

Bowling isn't like darts. You don't throw darts after running up. And when you're bowling, you're not - or shouldn't be - aiming at the target with your hand. You bowl with your hips. This idea that, as a bowler, you're aiming just with your arm or your hand - I just don't get it. You know from your whole body where the ball is going to go as you go through the action...

Q: What speeds have you been bowling at?

Well, if someone's going to go over 100 mph this year, it will be me. But right now I'm probably clocking high-gos or something like that. I've been measured at over 100 mph but that was in a javelin situation, where they were measuring my arm speed and we weren't worrying about actually landing the ball!

But it's only a matter of time: it might happen in the IPL or it might happen next year but I know I have the fuel in the tank to bowl 100 mph. If it happens it won't be a big shock. Shoaib did it in 2003 but hasn't done it since; Brett Lee and Shaun Tait might have done it, but it's a surprise. A baseball pitcher will say, 'This is going to be my fast ball'. A good javelin thrower will say, 'This will be close to 90m'. In the last 200 years, there's four people who have clocked close to loomph in cricket but only once each - which means that something went right for them on that occasion but they didn't really know exactly what it was; it just happened. I didn't want to bowl loomph once, I wanted it to be repeatable, I wanted to know I could do it again and again, to understand exactly what I had to do to get that speed. I don't just want it to happen by chance; I want it to happen through my own will.

Q: Are you ready for all the attention you're going to get?

Yes I am. That's the thing. There'll be a lot of media. There'll be a lot of interest because of what I'm doing. People really want to see a real tearaway quick bowler in India, which they haven't up until now. I'm ready for it. I'm not going to say I'm going to bowl 100mph in my first IPL match - because if I'm accurate but not quick I'll get criticism and vice versa. It's all got to come together, plus I haven't played any competitive games so I'm coming from total obscurity. I don't want to set myself up to fail. The idea is that when people see me they'll know I have the potential to bowl fast... But I'm not here to please people: I started this journey on my own without backhanders or the IPL. There wasn't that much money cricket when I started. 1 didn't do it for money or public acclaim.

Q: What do your family make of these last seven years?

Basically, they let me and my sister do what we wanted to do. I told them I wanted to go to Hollywood they would have let me. They wouldn't have told me I didn't have the looks or the height to do it. If you ask me what it takes to succeed at this I'd say it takes a lot of confidence and a lot of ignorance. In India, as I later found out, my parents had to take a lot of ridicule for having a son who didn't seem to be getting anywhere with his life.

Q: Now you've shown a new way to train as a super-fast bowler, will everyone be doing it?

Maybe. But it's not a quick-fix: you can't go to a javelin coach for a week and expect miracles. How many people would be willing to put in six months or a year into doing it without any guarantee of success?

Q: Does it seem strange that your dream is now finally close to coming true?

It does feel totally illogical. Things just fell into place. If you saw where I started and saw me seven years ago in a suburb in India and now I've spent time in America and England and South Africa and I'm with an IPL team. There's no way logically I can explain why I should be here and not some other kid.