Former Indian captain Rahul Dravid is likely to be the interim coach for India’s home series against New Zealand. With T20 World Cup being Ravi Shastri’s last assignment with the team, Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI) will look for a new head coach after the quadrennial event and the process will take longer than expected. Hence, the board wants Dravid at the helm as a stop-gap arrangement. Along with Shastri, the tenure of bowling coach Bharat Arun, fielding coach R Sridhar will come to an end after the completion of T20 WC.
The BCCI had earlier wanted Dravid to become the full-time coach of the Indian team but the former skipper had refused. Dravid, who is the in-charge of the National Cricket Academy in Bengaluru, had travelled with the second-string Indian team for limited-overs series against Sri Lanka earlier this year when the main team was concurrently playing in Australia.
According to reports in a national daily, few Australian coaches have also expressed their interest to coach the Indian squad, but the board is keen to have an Indian to take charge of the team. Meanwhile, the Indian Board is yet to put out an advertisement for the coach.
The India-New Zealand series will get underway a few days after the T20 World Cup final with the opening T20I in Jaipur on November 17, followed by games on November 19 and November 21 in Ranchi and Kolkata respectively. The T20I series will be followed two Test matches, which will be played in Kanpur (November 25 to 29) and Mumbai (December 3 to 7).
In the three-match T20I series India will also have a new captain in the format as current skipper Virat Kohli has announced that T20 World Cup will be his last campaign as India's T20I captain.
