BCCI President Sourav Ganguly has revealed that it wasn’t an easy task to get his former India teammate Rahul Dravid on board as Ravi Shastri’s successor as the head coach of the senior team.
Shastri’s tenure as India head coach ended with the T20 World Cup 2021 and under Dravid, the Indian team defeated New Zealand 3-0 in the T20Is and now, the unit is eyeing a 1-0 win over the Kiwis in the ongoing Test series.
In an interview with renowned journalist Boria Majumdar, Ganguly explained that his former teammate wasn’t ready to take up the job as it demanded him to be away from his family.
“We had Rahul in mind for a long period of time, both me and Jay, but he wasn’t agreeing because of the time away from home [and] because doing a national team’s job is [about being] on the road for about 8-9 months in a year and he has two young children.
At one stage we gave up, he was appointed as the head of NCA (National Cricket Academy, Bengaluru) to look after it and take things forward. We had done all the interviews and everything, his interview, and application, and he was appointed at the NCA. But even after he was appointed, we still kept insisting,” Ganguly told Boria Majumdar.
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Ganguly then said that Dravid was conveyed that the players, too, had an ‘inclination’ towards him and it took a few more personal calls from him to get the former captain and India A and U19 teams’ coach to say yes.
“And when we spoke to the players also [about] what sort of person they want, you could clearly see that, you know, there was an inclination to Rahul so we communicated that to him. I spoke to him personally many times [saying] that, ‘I know it’s hard but give it a try for two years, and if you find it too hard then we’ll see another way’.
Luckily he agreed and I don’t know what triggered the change in his mind but he agreed and I think this is the best BCCI could have done in terms of coaching once Ravi [Shastri] left,” he added.
(News18 inputs)
