The Coaching Credential We Don’t Have: Why India’s Most Important Job Needs a Licence

There is no shame in a classroom.

There is no shame in coaching a club side. There is no shame in taking a first-class team from November to March, learning your craft in the grinding work of selection, rotation, player development, and institutional memory.

There is certainly no shame in sitting down — really sitting down, for weeks — and studying the theory, the tactics, the psychology, the history, and the plain hard work of managing thirty-five adult men through the most intense scrutiny any profession in this country can throw at them.

And yet.

Every few years, we hand over the Indian team to someone who has skipped every single step in between.

The Job Nobody Actually Understands

Let’s be clear about what coaching the Indian national cricket team actually is.

It’s not just technical. It’s not just tactical. It’s not even primarily about knowing how to bat, bowl, or field — though yes, you should know those things properly.

It’s everything else.

Man-management. Handling a 23-year-old superstar who is suddenly dropped, a 32-year-old veteran whose contract is ending, a bowling all-rounder who wants to bat at number 4, a pace bowler who thinks the selection is personal vendetta. All of them have managers, all of them have egos, all of them are being watched by 1.4 billion people who have opinions about their career.

Reading people. Understanding that pressure doesn’t affect all players the same way. Some need to be screamed at. Some need space. Some need to be told they’re not good enough. Some need to be told they’re the chosen one. You need to read which is which, and you need to be right.

Tactical preparation. Not just knowing that a pitch will turn on day three, but understanding what your team needs on that pitch, what their team will try to do, and how to position your eleven to negate their strengths while exposing their weaknesses. That’s not instinct. That’s years of study.

Opposition analysis. Not just having a vague sense that their opening batsman plays short balls badly, but understanding why, understanding the frequency of that weakness, understanding whether it matters in this format, on this ground, with this field placement, against this bowler.

Talent identification. Harder than people think, because talent at domestic level doesn’t always translate. You need to know what a player will become at international pace, at international intensity, against international fields. You need to know what he’ll become under pressure. What he’ll become when he fails three times in a row. That requires study, not just watching a net session.

Building a dressing room. Eleven different backgrounds, eleven different egos, eleven different ideas about how the game should be played. Some are from small towns and have never seen a five-star hotel. Some are already sponsors of five-star hotels. Some have played fifty Tests. Some are playing their third. You need to make them one unit, not eleven individuals in matching uniforms.

The mental game. Cricket is 90 per cent mental and everyone knows it and nobody actually trains it the way they should. You need to understand motivation. You need to understand fear. You need to understand what a player needs to hear at 11 PM on the night before a crucial match, and what he needs to hear at lunch on the third day when things are going wrong, and what he needs to hear in the dressing room when he’s just been out for a duck in front of his home crowd.

Custodianship. Being a representative of Indian cricket, a custodian of its history, someone who understands that when he walks to the boundary in an India cap, he’s representing not just the team but the country. That matters. That needs to be trained, not just assumed.

Institutional memory. Understanding where Indian cricket has been, where it’s going, what has worked, what has failed, why Kapil’s 1983 team won, why we lost in ’96, why 2011 worked, why 2019 didn’t. You can’t make decisions in a vacuum. You need to know the game’s history, your game’s history, intimately.

Standing firm. When the team loses three matches in a row, when the press is calling for your head, when the board is asking questions, when the players are second-guessing, when the country is angry — you need to stand by the team. You need to believe when belief is hard. That’s not taught in a weekend seminar. That’s forged through experience.

The Path

There is a path. It doesn’t have to be the only path, but it should be a path, and it should be available, and it should be required.

Study. Sit down and learn the game at a level that most cricketers never do. Biomechanics. Psychology. Periodization. Nutritional science. Opposing team analysis. History. Read the classics. Study the coaches who built dynasties. Understand why a certain approach worked in a certain era, and what’s changed since then.

Apprenticeship. Coach a club side. Coach a first-class team. Take them through a season. Make selection decisions. Watch them fail because of your decisions. Watch them succeed because you prepared them right. Live with the consequences. Learn what actually works when there’s no safety net, no corporate structure, no sponsorship deals to fall back on.

Case work. Real situations. A player is not performing but has been with the team for ten years. Your opener is injured. Your death bowler is getting hit every match. Your spinner is being targeted. Your batsmen are struggling against left-arm pace. Study how these situations have been handled. Study what worked. Study what didn’t.

Man-management training. Conflict resolution. Leadership under pressure. Handling media. Understanding institutional dynamics. How to deliver bad news. How to motivate. How to discipline. How to support. This is learnable, but only if you actually learn it.

Mentorship. Work under a great coach. Understand how they think. Why they make the decisions they make. What they see that others don’t. This is where the intangibles get transferred.

Certification. At the end of it — not at the beginning — there should be a framework. A standard. Not a guarantee of success (no coaching certification guarantees that), but a minimum standard of preparation. A statement that says: this person has studied the theory, done the practical work, understood the psychology, managed the conflicts, and is ready to step into the most demanding coaching role in Indian cricket.

The Cost of Skipping the Steps

We don’t do this. And so we get:

Coaches who know how to bat but don’t know how to teach batting. Coaches who can spot talent but can’t manage it once they’ve found it. Coaches who understand tactics but fold when the pressure comes. Coaches who are great at addressing the press but terrible at addressing a player in distress. Coaches who don’t know the history of the game they’re coaching.

And the result is predictable: instability, inconsistency, players who don’t trust their coach, support staff who aren’t aligned, a team that plays well in patches and collapses under pressure.

Not because the players aren’t good enough. Because the coach wasn’t prepared enough.

There Is No Shame

The irony is this: the best coaches in the world — the ones who have built dynasties, who have turned mediocre teams into champions, who have managed the most intense pressure without flinching — they all did the work.

There is no shame in any of it. The classroom, the club side, the long unglamorous seasons of first-class cricket — that is not a detour on the way to the top job. That is the qualification for it.

The only shame is ours: that we keep pretending the most important job in Indian cricket is one you can walk into without a licence.