Cricket News: A case for Ashish Nehra as India’s white-ball coach

“You know, with all due respect to Rahul Dravid, my colleague and we played a lot of cricket together; he has an extraordinary brain. 

“But if you don’t want to remove Dravid from T20I as a coach, then help him with someone who has recently retired. 

“Someone like Ashish Nehra who has got a tremendous cricketing brain. Look what he has done there at Gujarat Titans.

“It will also encourage the young guys with what Ashish will bring to the team. It could also be anyone, who just retired.”

On the surface, Harbhajan makes an interesting case. Nehra did a great job with the Gujarat Titans, helping them win the IPL title in their first season. 

Everyone in the team greatly appreciated his work, and he generally encouraged players to play freely and express themselves. 

And it was an approach that worked a treat – not only did Gujarat’s Indian core do well, but so did their foreign stars. 

But would it represent a significant risk for the Indian team? Yes. 

For one, the pressure on an IPL coach is much less than on someone within the national team. On the IPL side, many fans are backing you to win. 

For the Indian side, it’s the whole country rooting for your success – and ready to bring you down if you don’t meet expectations. 

There’s also the fact that, for all the excellent work he’s done at GT, Nehra has been a head coach for all but one season of the IPL, which lasts about two months. 

The sample size of his coaching work is negligible. And it would be a risk of the highest order to promote someone with such little coaching experience to a national role. 

So, it would be tough to see Nehra becoming India’s new coach in the immediate future. But if he continues to impress at Gujarat, it might well come to him one day. 

However, there is some merit in what Harbhajan said. And maybe India needs to consider having entirely different coaching set-ups for white and red ball cricket. 

It’s something England have done to significant effect in recent times, and they, like India, play a lot of cricket all year round. 

The skills and mindset required for red and white ball cricket are vastly different. It is unfair to expect one man to shoulder the burden of leading a national team across three other formats. 

So, while Nehra might not be a short-term option for the Indian team, he or anyone else could replace Dravid as India’s white-ball coach – provided the BCCI wants to move to such a set-up, of course.