Mumbai: The one person Praful Hinge thanked while accepting the player of the match award after his life-changing spell of fast bowling on IPL debut was Naveen Babu, the physio at the MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai with whom the Nagpur bowler spent six months for rehab after a stress fracture of the back.
A physio is indeed a fast bowler’s best friend. In 2023, forget the IPL stage, Hinge hadn’t even started playing for his state team. He was just an upcoming U23 Vidarbha talent— untapped, raw, and broken physically and mentally due to the back injury. From the high of being picked for the foundation with the prospect of working with Glenn McGrath, Hinge was staring at months of inactivity and rehab.
“Rehabs can be long and boring. Praful was patient and determined. For the first six weeks he had to go back home and rest. After that I had every session planned for him based on his progression with milestones set for each phase,” Babu recalls. “Handing him over to S&C (strength and conditioning) was delayed, his bowling workload charted out with help from our analyst Raja. We delayed his comeback by a month. Once fully fit, he went on to become the highest wicket-taker in U23s and got selected for the Indian Emerging team.”
“Rehab is a team work between the physio, S&C, psychologist, yoga trainer, analyst and the coaches,” said Ramji Srinivasan, former Indian Strength and Conditioning coach who was among the MRF support staff who worked with Hinge.
“Once he had regained enough strength, all we did was fine tune his bowling action,” said M Senthilnathan, MRF head coach. “He was trying to muscle the ball and the body was falling. We ensured he used his non-bowling arm more. This change does not come in a day, it takes overs and overs to achieve.”
What also helped Hinge was getting to work later with Varun Aaron, the ex-India pacer who had a long stint as the academy trainee. Aaron, known for his express pace, was constantly troubled by injuries. Armed with first-hand knowledge sharing from his Sunrisers Hyderabad bowling coach, Hinge delivered a triple-wicket over—the best first over showing by a pacer in IPL history.
Dhruv Jurel’s dismissal was typical Hinge—line and length bowling with a little bit of movement, like McGrath. But Hinge had executed his plan to bowl a yard shorter to Vaibhav Sooryavanshi and hurry him for pace. “He didn’t give any room to Vaibhav,” said Senthilnathan. “That’s exactly what Bhuvneshwar Kumar tried to bowl in the previous match too, but missed his areas.”
On the speed gun, Hinge’s three dismissals were clocked at 139.8 kph (Sooryavanshi), 140.8 kph (Jurel) and 139.3 kph (Lhuan-dre Pretorius). No wonder Hinge’s Insta handle—the following has rocketed from 15,000 to 445,000—is named ‘prafulhinge_140’. Not express pace, but fast enough with his ability to extract seam movement from a good length. Hinge was just the mode of bowler SRH were missing in captain Pat Cummins’ absence.
Alongside Hinge, Monday night also belonged to their other debutant Sakib Hussain (4 wkts) and Sri Lanka’s Eshan Malinga (2). Incidentally, all three pacers have had stints at the MRF academy. Together they lapped up all the 10 RR wickets in Hyderabad on a batter’s paradise on Monday.
In the 1990s and the 2000s, the pace foundation was the sole scientific centre that acted as a feeder line to bolster India’s fast bowling stocks. Two of India’s greatest, Javagal Srinath and Zaheer Khan, took early learnings at the centre under Lillee. But Hinge’s case shows that even today, before fast bowlers make the targeted list and are tended to at BCCI’s Centre of Excellence (COE), the Chennai facility serves as a great place to upskill and repair.
