BCCI planning overhaul of NCA, coaching staff departs

MUMBAI: 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 been a ‘permanent employment’ with the 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.

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Among the 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.

The NCA has been in focus over the last one year after the COA exited along with the academy’s former chief operations officer (COO) Tufan Ghosh – a COA appointment. The BCCI and its member associations are of the clear view that the NCA needs a complete overhaul and Dravid is “the best individual to drive it forward”.

The board says it “simply wants to ensure that the right processes are followed” going forward.

Some senior, retired India and first-class cricketers were left surprised in 2019 when the NCA went ahead with appointments of coaching staff under the COA regime without listing out the mandatory advertisements for those roles on the BCCI website.

Senior ex-cricketers – who had wished to contribute at the NCA – raised an alarm back then, saying they were not aware of the academy hiring coaches.

“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 say.