Former Indian fielding coach R Sridhar’s book ‘Coaching Beyond: My Days with the Indian Cricket Team’ tells a lot of interesting and intriguing things about Indian cricket during his coaching tenure.
India’s four-match series against South Africa in 2015. In one of them, R Sridhar said that he wanted to step down after Indian captain Virat Kohli expressed his disappointment with him.
When India won the first match of the series, the second match was tied, India won the third match and we were trying to win the fourth match. However, the South African batsmen resisted before tea on the fifth day. Former South African batsman Amla played one of the best innings of his career to save the match, scoring 25 runs off 244 balls, while AB de Villiers took 43 off 297 balls.
He was chatting with Prasanna Agoram in the common area between the teams when he heard someone calling out “Shri Bhai, Shri Bhai”. I didn’t notice it at first. Realizing that it was Kohli, I ran to him.
“I ran down and by that time the umpire and the players had started walking back. “
“Virat looked at me and I read everything from his face and saw disappointment in it,” he added. Even though we won, I was disappointed that the captain did not pay attention to my work and did not listen to what he was saying. I thought about resigning.”