New Delhi: India will have a new coach before the tour of Sri Lanka next month, the BCCI said Wednesday while conceding that it failed to resolve the differences between Anil Kumble and Virat Kohli.
“Team India will get their new head coach before tour to Sri Lanka. The assignment of the new head coach will be till the next World Cup to be held in June 2019 in England,” said BCCI acting president CK Khanna.
Another top BCCI official, Rajeev Shukla, said all possible efforts were made to sort out the issues between the captain and the coach.
“BCCI tried its level best to resolve the issue. The acting secretary, the CEO, they discussed the matter with Kumble and Kohli in great detail, the board consulted the chairman of the COA (Vinod Rai) also,” Shukla told reporters.
“They tried to resolve the issues but eventually no outcome could be found out and Kumble decided to move on,” he added.
Kumble, in his statement, said that Kohli had reservations about his coaching ‘style’ and there partnership was ‘untenable’.
When asked whether Virat Kohli was the only one who objected to Kumble as coach, Shukla said: “All these are speculations. As I said, sometimes there are differences of opinion and BCCI tried its level best to resolve the whole issue but sometimes things don’t work. Sometimes it happens that you can’t get along with someone. It is not that captain is given all the importance. We give importance to everybody.”
Meanwhile another BCCI source stated that the body will invite more applications for the post of Indian team’s coach to give the cricket advisory committee (CAC) a wide range of options for picking the suitable candidate.
“Look, when we had invited applications last time, Anil was an automatic entry. That might have prompted a lot of people from thinking that what’s the need to apply when the current coach is doing well and is in the mix,” a senior BCCI official said Wednesday.
“Now the situation has completely changed. A lot of people will now be interested knowing it’s an open field,” the official added.