"We've got some bowling options we need to look at" - RCB's director of cricket Mo Bobat on auction strategy, Green and scouting in India [Exclusive]
RCB’s new Director of Cricket Mo Bobat, who played a key role in England’s renaissance on the international stage as performance director of the Men’s team, is excited about the IPL challenge. With 12 years of experience in the ECB set-up, which saw England clinch the 2015 ODI World Cup and the 2022 T20 World Cup, 40-year-old Bobat’s resume boasts of significant achievements.
In an exclusive interview with Sportskeeda, Bobat opened up in detail on his vision for RCB, the challenges of scouting for the right players in a huge country like India, and also shed light on the franchise’s auction strategy for IPL 2024.
Q) You have worked with Andy Flower [coach] closely before, and there's been a real change in the mentality, which we have seen tangibly with the England cricket team. Was it easy or difficult to get those results? We are seeing players like Jos Buttler, Ben Stokes, and Jonny Bairstow go hard right from ball one. How hard or easy was it to instill in the team?
Mo Bobat: Well, the first thing is you’ve got to start with good players. We've got a lot of talent in England and a lot of good players. And then, once you've got those good players, you want to create the type of environment and culture where they can truly go out and show the best version of themselves.
It's too easy to put limits and constraints on what people are capable of. And you're trying to remove that. And a big part of that is allowing them to be clear in their minds, to keep things pretty simple. To help them to understand situations and moments in games. And then encourage them to back their strengths under pressure - if they're good at something.
And they've practiced it and thought it through 100% commitment from the environment, do what you need to do, even if the outcome doesn't work, that's fine. And then a big part about that is, if you do that, you can put the opposition under pressure.
Well, sport is a game about duels - team versus team or man versus man; you want to win those duels. And you want to put the opposition under pressure as much as possible. If you do that consistently enough, you win enough moments in the game. So that's the way we've tried to approach it.
Q) And coming to the RCB side of things. So here, generally, we have seen, the team has a lot of big stars, big names. People who have achieved a lot in world cricket. But the team as a whole sometimes doesn't seem to gel. I think one very important point you brought up was removing the fear of failure, basically, or at least sticking to the processes even when you fail. So are you looking for more of the same?
Mo Bobat: Well look, to win anything and to achieve very special things that we want to achieve, it is going to take a collective effort. Every single player, every single coach, every single support staff, and everyone that's a part of our CV will contribute. My emphasis will be having good people around and creating the right culture where we're all committed to our mission.
So for me, it's pretty simple. Everybody's got a role to play. And certainly, from a playing perspective, the entire squad contributes. My experience of winning and being involved in winning World Cups is, that you don't win that with just a handful of players, you go out with the whole squad contributing. And there are plenty of moments away from the camera when those contributions take place.
Q) You spoke a lot about scouting and how you identify talent young. Once you identify the talent, it's also a lot of other factors, right? Like you spoke a lot about mental holistic well-being, etc. So once you spot a talented player, how do you like ensure he or she is given the right nurturing? Spotting a talent might be easy, but at the age of 13-14, you might not know whether they're committed enough to back it up.
Mo Bobat: Yeah, I often think the cricketing system and sport often expects too much, you know, 13-14 and 15-year-olds? Why would they be committed to something? I'm not sure how committed I was to when I was 13 and 14. And we easily forget that when we become adults.
So from my perspective, I just think it is a case of having a rigorous approach to how you identify talent, to try and use both subjective and objective information sources, try and have a longitudinal long-term perspective, and having a holistic profile where you cover technical, tactical, physical, psychological, and lifestyle. All of that is important.
And then, once you feel like you're ready to invest in the player, the key thing is growing their strengths, making their strengths into super strengths where you can, so they can impact games moving forward. You might have to support them with some weaknesses, of course, and ultimately, you want to enhance and assess their ability to perform under pressure. And they're going to do that when they feel safe and backed.
Q) And in a vast country like India, where almost the whole breadth and length of the country plays cricket, scouting becomes an even tougher sort of proposition. Right? There's so much talent everywhere. So how do you keep track and what is the process which goes on there? Where and how can you unearth, say, an Umran Malik, for example?
Mo Bobat: It's funny, you describe that as being tough. I think it's brilliant. Yeah. Every other country in the world would swap their talent pool for him. Yes, probably. So it's funny how India describes that as that's a challenge. I think it's an opportunity. In England, we were able to put out pretty competitive teams, and we've got nothing like the talent pool that India has got. We've been very envious of the people who played cricket and the weather that you have, and the time that you can play.
In England, often you're indoors because it's raining, it's cold. So I don't see a difficulty, I see opportunity. It doesn't mean you're going to be organized; it means you've got to scale the operations. It means you've got to build relationships and have a real network of people that feed information into there all the sorts of things that, in time, I plan to give good attention to. And we are already doing a good job, I believe, of identifying players. But I want to work with the guys that we've got at RCB and take that to another level.
Q) And my final question is going to be about the auctions coming up. So we have the WPL and the IPL auctions as well. So, is there a certain profile of the player you are looking for? Is it going to be someone who's going to suit the kind of cricket RCB wants to play? Or is it going to be role-specific? Without giving away too many details, what's the general strategy going to be like?
Mo Bobat: Yeah, I'm not so clear on the WPL perspective, I don't have any WPL responsibility. So my role focuses primarily on the IPL, as you probably saw with our retention and release decision-making. We explained some of this in the post-deadline interviews that we did. But, there’s a pretty strong rationale and logic to what we're trying to do.
We wanted to restructure the team members slightly, and wanted to probably get better flexibility out of our overseas options. So we've made some, I think, brave decisions there. And some difficult decisions. You know, it's always difficult when you're releasing players that are committed to RCB. And it's sad to see them go because they've all contributed to our team's performances. But we've made those decisions because we've got a bit of a strategy in mind.
We did want to free up enough purse to make some acquisitions. That was the intent. We wanted to free up enough purse so that, we could make some changes, and improve in some areas. When we had the opportunity to pounce on what was our number one target, Cameron Green, we were able to do that quickly because we had the purse.
Once we had decided to release someone like Wanindu Hasaranga, who is a fantastic bowler and had been recruited as an all-rounder for us, we wanted to structure the all-rounder position slightly differently, and Cameron Green was our number one target.
Now, we could have taken the risk of trying to see if he made it to auction, someone else could have picked him up, or you could get outbid at the auction because he's going to be in demand. I believe there's also quite a big gap between him and the other people who could be available for that role at the auction.
So that's good [Green locked in], helps us out, means we go to the auction with a bit more focus. We've got some bowling options that we need to look at going into the auction. So we've spent some time thinking about that. But I think we're in a good place. I think we've got a good amount of money to recruit the smaller roles that we've got to fill in.
(Mohammad Bobat was speaking to Ashwin Hanagudu on the sidelines of the RCB Innovation Lab’s Leaders Meet India event held at the Padukone-Dravid Center for Sports Excellence in Bangalore.)