da betobet： Exactly one year after the National Cricket Academy was formally inaugurated, India’s premier coaching body gets ready to welcome its second batch of trainees at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore on Tuesday
Staff Reporter30-Apr-2001Exactly one year after the National Cricket Academy was formally inaugurated, India’s premier coaching body gets ready to welcome its second batch of trainees at the Chinnaswamy Stadium in Bangalore on Tuesday. The NCA is qualitatively raising its profile this year with the setting up of five zonal academies in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata, Chennai and Kanpur operating in sync with the parent body.Twenty candidates will attend this year’s session and virtually all are inthe Under-19 age bracket with 23-year-old Bengal stumper Deep Dasgupta theoldest of the lot. The trainees are Vinayak Mane (Mumbai), Y Gnaneswara Rao(Andhra Pradesh), Gautam Gambhir (Delhi), Ishan Ganda (Haryana), KashinathKhadkikar (Maharashtra), Gaganinder Singh (Punjab), Arindam Das (Bengal),Arjun Yadav (Hyderabad), Ajay Ratra (Haryana), Vidyut Sivaramakrishnan(Tamil Nadu), Raja Ali (Railways), Uday Karkera (Maharashtra), Salil Yadav(Gujarat), Mulewa Dharmichand (Karnataka), Swapnil Hazare (Mumbai), LBalaji (Tamil Nadu), Maninder Singh (Madhya Pradesh), Shalabh Srivastava(Uttar Pradesh), Parthiv Patel (Gujarat) and Deep Dasgupta (Bengal).Two of the twenty, Ajay Ratra and Deep Dasgupta are also in the list of 25probables announced by the national selectors to attend the preparatorycamp before India’s tour of Zimbabwe next month. The camp is also scheduled forBangalore from September 13-18, with the team to be released on the finalday.An informal meeting of the coaching personnel appointed to the NCA as wellas its zonal units has been held over the last couple of days in order tostandardise coaching techniques across the board. The staff at the NCA hasundergone a reshuffle with KSCA secretary Brijesh Patel taking over fromHanumant Singh as Director. Balwinder Sandhu is the chief coach, KJayantilal assistant coach and Roger Binny consultant coach.Hanumant who indicated last December that he was resigning from his post ofDirector for personal reasons has been accommodated in the NCA Committeechaired by Raj Singh Dungarpur, with Polly Umrigar, Sunil Gavaskar and SVenkataraghavan as the other members. The head of coaching at the fiveregional centres are: Nari Contractor (West Zone), Yashpal Sharma (NorthZone), Kris Srikkanth (South Zone), Arun Lal (East Zone) and KailashGhattani (Central Zone).While four of the five zonal academies, in the North, East, West andCentral, will be kicked off on Tuesday, the South Zone academy wouldcommence proceedings a day later. This was announced by Ashok Kumbhat,convenor of the Academy. Kumbhat told PTI in Chennai that the BCCI hadadvanced a circular for the period from May 2 to 27, advising the zonalacademies to pursue the same pattern of coaching and exercises followed inthe NCA. “Perhaps, we will get another circular before May 27, as the campis for a period of two months’, Kumbhat said.The following trainees (all in the Under-19 age group) are to attend thecamp: Deepak Chougule, H T Sudhir Rao, Vinay Uthappa, Stuart Binny, ChetanWilliams, Senthil Kumar (all Karnataka), A S K Varma, K Srinivasa Rao, P AV N Raju and G Shankar Rao (all from Andhra), T Suman and AT Rayadu(Hyderabad), Vikram Kumar and Vishal Kudua (Tamil Nadu), Sreesanth, VincentGomes and Mousam Nathani (Kerala) and Sher Bahadur Yadav (Goa).