Greg Chappell Reveals How Ganguly Helped Him Get The Job Of Indian Coach

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Greg Chappell's stint as the coach of India for two years is often termed as 'worst years for Indian cricket'. His two-year tenure saw a huge spat between the then Indian captain Sourav Ganguly and Chappell. 

However, in a Cricket Life Stories podcast, the Australian revealed that it was Ganguly only that helped him getting the job to coach the Indian cricket team in the first place. 

Chappell had never coached a team after he retired from cricket in 1984 although he was a national selector till 1988. He was approached by South Australian Cricket to a coaching role which he enjoyed. 

“I (later) realised that there were quite a few positives about becoming re-involved in the game in a different role. So I took that role on and I enjoyed it a lot more than I thought I could,” Chappell said. 

Soon after his coaching role for Southern Australia, Sourav Ganguly, who was in poor form at that time, approached him for technical advice. 

“After I finished [my role] with South Australia, I got a call from Sourav Ganguly, a contact from Ganguly, to see if I was living in Sydney at that time and whether he could come to Sydney and spend some time with me, as he was struggling with his batting.” 

The two stayed in Sydney for a week where they worked on both mental and physical skills of Ganguly. 

"I worked with Sourav on whether he had a mental routine, and he wasn’t aware of it. [Chappell asked] ‘Ok? If you thought about it, do you think that you’ve got a routine in there that you use sometimes that you don’t use always’ and he started to think about it at night time between our sessions, and he finally worked out that ‘Yes, I think I do have a routine that I use sporadically."

“So we worked on getting him to understand what his routine was and what it should be and manage that on a ball-by-ball basis and a couple of things from the physical point of view,” he added. 

After their brief meeting, Ganguly got much better with his skills and started to make runs again. 

In 2004/05, John Wright ended his coaching stint for India. Ganguly, who personally did get a lot of help from Chappell's advice, put forth the Australian's name for the job. 

“He [Ganguly] was the one who approached me about coaching India. I had other approaches but I decided that (since) John Buchanan was coaching Australia at that time and would likely be that way for a few years to come, and my window of opportunity as a coach was closing."

"If I couldn’t go to Australia then I would love to coach the most populous, fanatical cricket country in the world, and that opportunity came about because Sourav, who was the captain, made sure that I did.” 

However, the next two years saw the downfall of Indian cricket, where not only Ganguly stepped down as captain but the team crashed out of the 2007 World Cup in group stages as well.