He has been a part of Mumbai’s celebrated Ranji Trophy outfit on multiple occasions. From T10 and The Hundred to the T20 World Cup in 2021, he has been a part of various cricket set-ups across the globe.
Still, Saurabh Walkar is thrilled with his current assignment — as the New Zealand team’s Performance Analyst for the 2023 Men’s World Cup.
“I cannot even call it a dream come true since I had never ever dreamt of anything like this. I was hooked to cricket as a school kid while watching the 1996 World Cup in India. And to be a part of a team set-up for another World Cup in India is just inexplicable,” Walkar said.
Walkar has been operating as an analyst for almost two decades.
Despite having worked with Afghanistan’s national team for 18 months, including the T20 World Cup in UAE in 2021, and having had a successful stint with Manchester Originals, he was surprised when he was approached by New Zealand Cricket (NZC) to check whether he was interested in being associated with the team for the World Cup.
“I had never worked with any member of the New Zealand set-up for the World Cup till then, so I was slightly taken aback, so I asked them what made them reach out to me and I was told Simon Katich had recommended my name to Simon Insley (NZC’s Performance Manager),” Walkar said.
Katich, the former Australia batter, has been with the Manchester franchise in The Hundred for the last two seasons that Walkar has been a part of. Impressed by Walkar’s performance, Katich suggested his name to NZC since it was looking for “an analyst who had the experience of having worked with different set-ups and at different locations in India”.
“It was followed by a detailed interview and they liked my style and here I am, ready to live a dream that I had never dreamt of,” he says.
As a result, Walkar joined the New Zealand set-up ahead of New Zealand’s ODI series in England last month, before heading to Bangladesh for the last series and then travelled to India as part of the Black Caps entourage.
Fully prepared
“The first meeting in England did give me more than a few pangs in my stomach. Like I said, I had never worked with anyone in the New Zealand set-up earlier, so I wasn’t sure how I would be received. So I had prepared so thoroughly and it went so smoothly. Everyone in the squad is highly professional and friendly,” he said.
Ask him about the Kiwi who eats his brain the most and pat comes the reply: Matt Henry. “He wants to know everything. He asks how to bowl to a batter in PowerPlay, in the death overs. He would ask frontfoot and backfoot strike rate of a batter,” Walkar said. “Every analyst relishes these challenges and the key is to be prepared and to be ahead of the opposition.”
In a fiercely competitive cricket landscape, with match-ups being the in-thing across the globe in various formats, the role of an analyst is becoming more important with every passing week. An analyst has to work in tandem with the captain and the coach and sense their styles to optimise his role, according to Walkar.
He cites an example during his The Hundred stint with Manchester Originals, which made it to the final in successive seasons. “Katich, the coach is thoroughly into analysis. He wants to everything — data, numbers, stats, videos, ground conditions and dimensions, pitch behaviour, performance with the new ball, with the old ball, everything,” he said.
“Whereas Jos Buttler, the captain, is more into match-ups. He would tell me to feed him only real-time information about match-ups that could work during a match.”
Fairytale ride
It has indeed been a fairytale ride for Walkar ever since he decided to drop out of an engineering degree in his quest to be a performance analyst in the mid-2000s. The role of an analyst in Indian cricket was at such a nascent stage that the clan used to be referred to as “video analyst” — a term that all the analysts disapprove of.
Growing up in a typical Maharashtrian household in Mumbai, Walkar was hooked to cricket. While spending hours playing at Shivaji Park — the famed ground in Dadar — while studying engineering, Walkar used to travel to the Cricket Club of India and bowl to budding cricketers from England who would travel for camps.
“They used to be on the lookout for net bowlers and I was thrilled to be bowling to overseas cricketers. We used to be paid ₹75 per day back then but it used to be fun,” Walkar recalled.
During one such camp, he noticed a member of the contingent shooting videos of players, transferring them on to his laptop and then discussing the same with the players later on. Fascinated by his modus operandi, Walkar inadvertently found his calling.
“I offered the help to their analyst and he liked it. For the next few tours, he stopped getting his assistant down, perhaps it saved his costs, and roped me in. I learnt the basics of analysis, how to operate the software and slowly started helping out local players to analyse. Once I realised I was enjoying it, I decided to drop out of engineering and devote myself to be an analyst.”
Assignment
Impressed by his work, the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) gave him a short assignment for an umpiring workshop before he was appointed as Mumbai’s Ranji Trophy team’s analyst in 2006-07.
“It was overwhelming. The dressing room was full of stalwarts whom I had grown up watching ply their trade. You had Sachin (Tendulkar), Zaheer (Khan), Ajit (Agarkar), Amol (Muzumdar), Ramesh (Powar), Nilesh (Kulkarni) and a young Rohit (Sharma) playing his debut season,” Walkar reminisced.
“I used to be so overawed in their presence that I never dared to enter the dressing room. I would quietly sit on my table and help the players out whenever they came and sat next to me. I thought of all these times when I walked into the Lord’s dressing room for The Hundred final.”
If he was allowed to turn the clock back and go back to his engineering degree days, would he complete it? “I will again drop out if I am presented with the same opportunity,” he signed off.
