The Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) has decided against renewing the contracts of those National Cricket Academy (NCA) coaches hired by the previous regime under Committee of Administrators (COA) last year.
The COA, led by chief Vinod Rai, had appointed bowling, batting and fielding coaches at the NCA, who then worked under NCA director Rahul Dravid.
These appointments, however, had been done without any formal interview process, which was interestingly against the protocol that COA itself designed for all employments, including that of Team India's head coach and support staff personnel.
The existing apex council, led by president Sourav Ganguly, came into being following the board's elections last September, which also signalled the end of COA after a controversial period at the helm of affairs.
"It was a case of apples and oranges given the way NCA hired coaching staff without interviews last year. Right now, with the pandemic disrupting everything, these coaches have had nothing to do in the last five-odd months. So, what's the point renewing these contracts? The BCCI will look at a complete overhaul of the structure and do things the right way once cricket begins," said those tracking developments, as quoted by Cricbuzz in a report.
It is understood, the NCA coaching staff hadn't come to know of the board's decision to not renew contracts until they were called by Dravid and BCCI's outgoing general manager (operations) for domestic cricket Saba Karim in the last 48 hours.
The Cricbuzz report states, "Other than Dravid, physiotherapist Ashish Kaushik - who has a 'permanent employment' with BCCI; trainer Anand Date; operations manager Kshemal Waingankar; and education head Sujit Somasundar are among the few individuals who will continue to work at the NCA. Among coaches, Narendra Hirwani (spin), Abhay Sharma (wicketkeeping) and Under-19 coach Paras Mhambrey continue to remain in their jobs, pending the terms of their contracts."
"The likes of Hrishikesh Kanitkar, Subroto Banerjee, Shiv Sundar Das, Mansoor Ali Khan, Subhadeep Ghosh, T Dilip, Rajiv Dutta, Apurva Desai, Sitanshu Kotak, Ramesh Powar, among others, are the ones whose contracts have not been renewed. These individuals were involved with various age groups, including U-19 and India 'A' too."
Focus and scrutiny have come NCA's way ever since the COA left along with academy's former chief operations officer (COO) Tufan Ghosh, who was also appointed by Rai & his team.
It is learnt that the BCCI and its state association bodies are in favour of a complete overhaul of the academy and believe Dravid is "the best individual to drive it forward." The board "simply wants to ensure that the right processes are followed" going forward.
COA's decision to appoint coaches without listing out the mandatory advertisements for those roles on the BCCI website had left some of the retired India and first-class cricketers genuinely surprised. Among them were also those who had wished to contribute to the development of the NCA as an institution.
"The COA left things in a complete mess. The BCCI has a lot on its hands to rectify all that had been going wrong between 2017 and 2019," board members were quoted saying in the report.
(Inputs from Cricbuzz)
