chennai the covid19 pandemic has brought about a lull in the sporting world over the past few weeks with no live action to look forward to athletes have been confined to their homes just like the rest of the world at a time like this the sporting fraternity has been compelled to use the online platform and devise new ways of ensuring that athletes continue to train and monitor their fitness toi takes a lookcricketover the past one week it is no coincidence that ms dhoni and r ashwin among the biggest names in indian cricket have facilitated online cricket coaching programmes through their academies while the ms dhoni cricket academy where the former indian captain is not directly involved with the operations but provides inputs to the coaches and monitors developments is offering live classes on facebook for its trainees ashwins academy is engaging its wards in a range of ways including online sessions with the star offie himselfgiven the fervour for the sport in the country the online coaching programmes are understandably attracting huge interest according to former firstclass cricketer and chief coach of the dhoni academy satrajit lahiri each video session that they post is being watched keenly we are clocking almost 10000 views across all platforms for every video he tells toitalking about the mode of operation online lahiri further informs we have an app called cricketor where we regularly upload demo drills the trainees also need to upload their videos so that we can keep a tab on their activities we give feedback accordinglythe requirement for batsmen in these videos is to repeatedly throw balls against a wall and play with soft hands as lahiri points out it achieves two objectives a tight defence and better handeye coordination bowlers meanwhile can perform various drills without releasing the ball monitoring the repeatability of their bowling actions and loadingup positionsformer tamil nadu and chennai super kings csk batsman vidyut sivaramakrishnan who has signed up as a coach on another one of these online coaching platforms called ludimos says that youngsters are sometimes surprisingly more attentive when being coached online i have found that students are more aware of what is being said to them online you can zone in on one aspect of a players game for instance a batsmans head position and really work towards correcting that he observesniranjan godbole punes pyc hindu gymkhana cricket coach and assistant coach of maharashtra ranji team informs he is holding brief sessions daily on videocalling apps zoom or google classrooms there are about 45 players in one session we hold the call for 4045 minutes where the kids do shadow training or practice bowling actionsfootballthe all india football federation aiff has come up with online classes for more than 300 of its referees while referees from categories 3 and 4 are undergoing online classes for over two hours thrice a week more than 200 referees from categories 1 and 2 are taking online exams on