After 15 years of international cricket, Chaminda Vaas retired in 2009.
Back in the day, Chaminda Vaas used to studiously keep a crumpled notebook in which he recorded rough-and-ready details of his victims. During the Asian Championship in 1999, he went and informed his teammates that he has picked his 200th victim in Tests. His colleagues congratulated him and he threw them a party. Only to be informed after the party, by coach Dav Whatmore, that he was still four wickets shy of the landmark.
A visibly stunned Vaas leafed over the details again and found that his maths was wrong. Later, when he eventually achieved the feat against England, his teammates demanded another party, and Vaas being the gentle soul he is, readily obliged.
Though he doesn’t keep a notebook these days, he shows the same diligence on the field when guiding the young Sri Lankan pacers. He would observe them thread-barely, to the minutest detail, with his hawkish eyes concealed in shades. He would occasionally remove the shades, turn his arm over, and even make the ball bend back into the batsman.
While he wasn’t the most talkative or demonstrative bowler in his playing days, here he is the exact opposite, shouting instructions, admonishing his wards and instructing them. But Vaas shyly contradicts, “I’m just the same, feels just the same like I was in my playing days. The dressing room is a very familiar place for me,” he says.
He, though, doesn’t look the same. There are sprouts of grey in his stubble. The frame, still sturdy, has added a few layers of flab. But there is still a raw excitement in his eyes. “I don’t know whether I’d have fitted into any other place,” he says. Except perhaps the whites of a priest, which he had mulled over for a long time before he was smitten by cricket.
Even before he decided to retire from international cricket, in 2009, he had made up his mind that he would embark on a coaching career, not necessarily as a post-retirement source of income, but the urge to be involved with the game.
“I always had this desire to comeback as a coach. Whatever I learned during my playing days as an International cricketer I wanted to pass it on to the younger generation of Sri Lankan fast bowlers. I had a few stints here and there, and now back into my dressing room,” he says. The word “my” he emphasises, like you with things close to the heart.
It could have been better-timed, as Sri Lanka is in the middle of a rugged transition. Their talismanic spinner is knocking on the 40s, their best fast bowler plays only limited-over cricket. There are a few talented but erratic fast bowlers. Vaas can guide and mould them to a higher level.
“It’s a challenge and I love it. I always did that as a player in the middle, take up a challenge and deliver. It’s nothing new,” he says.
He says he’s more of a hands-on than textbookish coach. “I can share my knowledge and experience about the game. I played nearly 20 years for the country and took 400 plus international wickets. I can tell them my example and encourage them to do the same for Sri Lanka cricket. I had also learnt a lot of things from the likes of Dennis Lillee and other greats. It is this same thing that I am doing for young cricketers now,” he says.
In that sense, Vaas is their perfect role model, unlike for say Lasith Malinga, who’s freakishly brilliant but difficult to copy. Unlike Malinga, Vaas was not the most gifted fast bowler, but someone who was relentlessly accurate from a modest, grooved approach, given teeth by a wicked in-dipper, and with the stamina and patience to explore his opponents’ weaknesses hour after hour. The stamina, he attributes, to carrying the cross at St Mary’s Roman Catholic Church in Wattala in northern Colombo. “The only thing I insist them is to work hard.” Work hard like Vaas did in his early days.
Throughout the conversation he is mild-mannered, always on the brink of a smile. But the smile seldom manifests fully, unless in the spontaneous adrenaline rush of a wicket. The only time he gets slightly disturbed is when you describe unorthodox actions as “crazy”. “No, no, don’t call them crazy. Those bowlers are naturally different,” he asserts.
He feels it’s comparatively easier to work with them. “You don’t tinker with those actions. You just motivate them and tell them the basics and let him play the game that he likes to play,” he says.
What he is scouting for is not a bowler with an “unorthodox” action, but a left-arm seamer. “I want to have a left-arm fast bowler in the Sri Lanka national squad. We have one or two in the pool but I want to have someone who can do well for a longer period of time. The Sri Lankan cricket board is even looking at the school cricket to find a few,” he says. Would SLC consider bringing him back into the side? He just laughs heartily.
