Amid plenty of anticipation, Team India’s coaching staff was finalized last month. The Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) headed by Kapil Dev re-appointed Ravi Shastri as the head coach of for the next two years. On the other hand, the MSK Prasad-led selection committee re-elected Bharat Arun and R Sridhar as bowling and fielding coaches respectively while Vikram Rathour replaced Sanjay Bangar from the position of batting coach.
Just like Shastri, the support staff will also be at the helm till the World T20 in 2021 and their contracts will come into effect from September 5.
“The background check and all is done and just the CoA’s go-ahead is left and once that is finished, the coaches will be handed their contracts. The strength and conditioning coaches are currently undergoing their practical assessment at the National Cricket Academy (NCA). So once that is done, all the signings will be done together by the three-member committee. The contracts come into effect from September 5 so we still have some time to complete the process,” a BCCI functionary told IANS.
The general belief was that the bowling unit under coach Arun did remarkably well in the past 18 months while the team's fielding under Sridhar has also improved considerably. But the same can’t be said about Bangar and the batting department as India failed to fix its middle order woes which eventually cost them the World Cup semi-final.
In fact, sources in the know of developments within the team had also spoken of how some of the batsmen have had to seek advice of former batting stars when they have hit a bad patch.
“Without taking names, it is well documented that a couple of the current team players have spoken about how they approached some of the former India batsmen to help them erase out flaws in their batting when they were having issues scoring runs,” the source had told IANS.
After the appointment process, chief selector Prasad spoke on Rathour replacing Bangar and said: “Frankly speaking, if you see last five years, definitely there is some amount of improvement but looking ahead with the Test Championship coming up and two T20 World Cups, we thought there should be some freshness in that department, so that’s the reason why we went ahead with Vikram Rathour as the first choice.”
(With IANS inputs)
