3 unsung heroes who deserve appreciation for India's Asia Cup win
After grueling 14 days of hard-fought encounters, it was the Indian team who managed to have their hand on the beautiful trophy of Asia Cup for the seventh in the history of this tournament.
India started off their campaign against Hong Kong which proved to be a near nightmare for India as they managed to negate the Hong Kong scare. However, the Indian team covered that up with a fantastic performance against Pakistan while marking off their presence in the league.
The Super Four stage proved to be a clinical affair for India as they marched to the finals of the Asia Cup 2018. However, the finals proved to be an arduous task for India as they had to fight hard for their record seventh title.
Sans Virat Kohli, it was an even performance from all the members of the India team to win the title. However, there are quite a few unsung heroes who had a decisive part to play in the ploy of the Indian team.
Behind every successful man, there is a hand of a woman. Similarly, behind a successful outing of any team in a major tournament like the Asia Cup, there is a big hand of generous support staff.
Thus, in this feature, we will be talking about the recent contributions of three exclusive members from the support staff of the Indian team.
#1 Patrick Farhart: Lead Physiotherapist
Lead Physiotherapist to Indian Cricket team, Patrick Farhart has been an influential member of the Indian team for quite a long time now. He has also been a part of some dedicated teams like Australia, Kings XI Punjab, Sydney Sixers and many more.
Having 22 years of experience in the clinical management of musculoskeletal injury in professional sporting teams, Patrick has to keep track of clinical management of players within the Indian national team.
With a lot of workload hovering around the Indian team members, the job of a physiotherapist scales quite high, particularly while following the fitness of India's premium players who play all the three formats. Besides that, Patrick's importance of the role clarifies more in the case of prevention of injuries. Although it seems an easy job, there goes a lot behind the curtains.
Well, there have been many such occasions where you would have seen the physio running very hard in the field in case of injuries. One such episode happened recently in the final game between India and Bangladesh where Kedar Jadhav got his hamstrings stretched, and Patrick had to rush into the field to learn about the severity of the injury.
Although Jadhav was forced to leave the filed, the Indian support staff did manage to keep Kedar match ready which helped the Indian team to take the game deep.
Thus, no matter how naive it might sound, the Indian support staff, particularly Patrick, deserve a decent share in India's success at the global level as a cricketing superpower and much so for the Asia Cup win.