Newly-appointed chief coach of India Ravi Shastri has had his way as the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), on Tuesday, named former India pacer Bharat Arun as bowling coach till the 2019 World Cup.
It was expected after Shastri was picked by the Cricket Advisory Committee (CAC) on July 10 as chief coach that he will pick Arun, who is his friend.
Shastri also got his choice of entire core coaching staff on board with batting coach Sanjay Bangar promoted as an assistant coach while R Sridhar will continue to be the fielding coach.
However, there is lack of clarity about the role to be played by Zaheer Khan and Rahul Dravid, earlier named bowling consultant and overseas batting consultant, respectively.
Despite Shastri and BCCI officials insisting that Khan and Dravid will be on board, it has been learnt that both these former India stars were not even consulted by the CAC before announcing their names.
DNA has reported that according to a top BCCI official, the CAC, consisting of Sachin Tendulkar, VVS Laxman and Sourav Ganguly, had exceeded its brief by naming the support staff and not restricting itself to its job, which was to name the chief coach.
According to highly-placed sources, COA apparently found this out after talking to relevant people involved and then decided to accept Shastri’s list of support staff.
“Zaheer and Dravid were not even consulted before their names were announced,” a top official told DNA on Tuesday.
Would the two now be on board as consultants of Team India? The official said, “There are issues that need to be sorted out before taking them on board formally.
“Zaheer has a contract with two media companies and if he has to be hired, then we need to compensate him in order to avoid any conflict of interest.
“While the case of Dravid is different as India ‘A’ tours are normally at the same time as that of Team India. It may not be possible for him to accompany the seniors on overseas tours,” said the official.
It has been learnt that BCCI need to cough out more than Rs 4 crore to have Zaheer’s services for less than 100 days in a year. Dravid, on the other hand, has apparently conveyed to the BCCI that “he may well be utilised during camps than been on overseas tour”. “BCCI will speak to these two greats and then suggest ways to utilise their services for the betterment of the team,” added the official.
Why was this chaos?
Though, Shastri thanked the CAC members for giving him an opportunity to serve Indian team, he will be aware of how a member of the same committee created this chaos by tagging along Khan and Dravid.
On Tuesday, BCCI acting secretary Amitabh Choudhary chose to rubbish claims that the process of appointing the head coach and the support staff was a “fiasco”.
“I am absolutely clear in my mind that it was not a fiasco. Once Shastri was appointed the head coach, he obviously had to think of his responsibilities which come with that appointment. And as he has made it so abundantly clear that he wanted his core team. The other two gentlemen (Khan and Dravid), he’s (Shastri) spoken to them personally. They will be consultants and as you have heard, their contributions will be invaluable to the team,” said Choudhary.
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