Anubhav Katheria
Sanjay Manjrekar’s recent comments on the correlation between coach and team has sparked fire amongst people on social media, Manjrekar has slammed the hype around the newly appointed head coach Gautam Gambhir says there is no connection between coach and the success achieved by the team.
The question right now is,
Are coaches important to team success?
Coaches do play an important role in team building but in the end it’s the players who perform and not the coach.
As seen with the Indian team over the years coaches’ impact has not been above the team’s performance, except the Ravi Shastri era, under whom the Indian team became a destructive force in Test cricket and won matches on foreign soil as well as at home. India won back-to-back Test series in Australia which is still a record.
Indian won their first Ever World Cup in 1983 under Kapil Dev’s captaincy when there was no concept of coaches in the team, there were managers only.
Indian went through a rough patch with Greg Chappell as their head coach, they had a first-round exit from the 2007 ODI World Cup and Chappell was sacked from his position but before that WC there were several highly publicized infights in the Indian team between Chappell and Captain Sourav Ganguly, which resulted in the removal of Ganguly as captain and Rahul Dravid was appointed as captain, Ganguly was dropped from the ODI team and Test team. This Chappell-Ganguly controversy raged on from street protests to speeches in parliament, later Ganguly was called back in the team for 2007 ODI WC.
After India’s terrible performance in ODI WC all the senior players took their name out from the 2007 T20 WC and Rahul Dravid stepped down from the captaincy and a young team led by MS Dhoni was sent to South Africa without any coach (Lalchand Rajput was sent with the team as director of the team). India won the 2007 T20 WC and 4 years later under Head Coach Gary Kristen, MS Dhoni led Indian team won the ODI WC after 28 years. However, India didn’t win any WC after that till 2024 where they won the T20 WC under head coach Rahul Dravid and captain Rohit Sharma.
India also won the ICC Champions Trophy in 2013 under MS Dhoni, Duncan Fletcher was the head coach that time.
