In a not-so-surprising move, the BCCI has decided not to allow the National Cricket Academy (NCA) to renew the contract of any of the coaching staff members who had been hired in 2019 on a one-year contract under the aegis of the Supreme Court-appointed Committee of Administrators (COA).
The appointments of bowling, batting and fielding coaches at the NCA – who came to work under NCA director Rahul Dravid – had been done by the COA without any interview processes last year, against the very protocol that the COA had mandated for all appointments, including the Team India coach and support staff.
“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.
The coaching staff, whose contracts are not being renewed, had no idea of the development until they received calls in the last 48 hours from Dravid and BCCI’s outgoing general manager (operations) for domestic cricket Saba Karim to personally convey the same.
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, Shib 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.
