MUMBAI: If Prithvi Shaw has bounced back just a couple of months after being dropped from India’s Test team following his failure (0 & 4) in the first Test at Adelaide against Australia, then some credit has to go to former India coach and Aussie great Greg Chappell and the Mumbai youngster’s IPL team, the Delhi Capitals.
On Thursday, the 21-year-old Mumbai opener cracked the highest ever individual score in the history of the Vijay Hazare Trophy when he blasted an unbeaten 227 off merely 152 balls against a hapless Pondicherry attack, at the Sawai Mansingh Stadium in Jaipur.

“Chappell offered Prithvi some solutions to fix his technical issues after he was axed. Those suggestions seem to have worked. He looks more assured in his stance,” a source close to Shaw said.
After he returned to India from the long tour, Shaw was helped by the man with the ‘Midas touch,’ as far as cricketing coaching in India goes.
Just before he was about to leave for Vijay Hazare, Shaw had a few one-on-one sessions with former India batsman Pravin Amre, a personal coach of India batsmen Ajinkya Rahane and Shreyas Iyer, and now the assistant coach of the Delhi Capitals.
“Knowing that he would be down on confidence after being dropped from the Indian team, the Delhi Capitals (Shaw’s IPL team) jointly decided to help him. We only had a short time at our disposal as he had to leave with the Mumbai team for Jaipur to join the bio-bubble. We knew that he would be mentally down, and thus needed help,” Amre told TOI on Thursday.
Explaining Shaw’s short training stint with him, Amre said: “We worked on him for five days. He needed moral and ‘infrastructural’ support, and we provided both to him. While I provided my coaching to work on his skills, the Delhi Capitals’ flew in their Strength and Conditioning coach Rajinikanth Sivagnanam to work on his fitness. Rajinikanth had two-hour training sessions with him on his fitness, I worked for a similar time on his batting in the nets at the Shivaji Park Gymkhana.”
Shaw had a miserable time in IPL-2020, managing just 228 runs in 13 [email protected], but the Delhi Capitals’ faith in his skills remained intact. “One must give full credit to the Capitals for providing the right ‘infrastructure’ to help Prithvi. Since he’s an opener, I wanted him to bat against the brand new Kookaburra ball. The Capitals provided us with a dozen balls each ball costs Rs 15,000,” revealed Amre.
During the Adelaide pink-ball Test, a lot was talked about Shaw’s apparent weakness against the incoming ball. Did Amre, a former Mumbai coach, work on it? Refusing to go into the technical aspects of his batting that the former Mumbai coach worked on, Amre said: “I consider my role to be that of a doctor. I don’t go by what others have to say. I made a video of his batting, analyzed where he was going wrong, and showed him where he could improve. We then worked on those points together. I told him to forget about what happened in Test cricket and focus on white-ball cricket, as there are so many limited over games in near future. Since he knows me from the time I picked him for Air India on scholarship when he was just 13, he is comfortable with me, and trusts me, which is important for a coach. As a coach, I’m glad he played at least 100 balls today.”