On Tuesday, the BCCI pruned the list of prospective candidates for administrative manager's post with the most noted name among them being the former Tamil Nadu left-arm spinner Sunil Subramaniam, who is best known as India star Ravichandran Ashwin's childhood coach. As per information received, former Gujarat player Prakash Bhatt, Delhi's medium pacer Shankar Saini and Services player Arman Malik are the other candidates in the fray.
"Yes, Sunil Subramaniam, a former left-arm spinner from Tamil Nadu is among the shortlisted candidates. He has the most impressive CV with a first-class record having played more than 70 games at the domestic level," a BCCI official, privy to the development and not wishing to be officially quoted, told PTI today.
Subramaniam, who played 74 matches for Assam and Tamil Nadu has taken 285 wickets apart from scoring 1096 runs.
However, his claim to fame has been as the coach who taught Ashwin tricks of the trade regarding off-spin bowling.
Even after being an established India player, Ashwin had time and again come back to Subramaniam to iron out his flaws.
Malik has been Mumbai Ranji team's administrative manager while Prakash Bhatt is a right-hand batsman who has played 51 matches for Gujarat.
An interesting name is U-19 national selector Rakesh Parikh, a right-hand batsman who has played more than 50 first-class matches for Baroda.
Former pacer Saini has played 20 first-class matches taking 57 wickets -- unlucky not to have played more with the likes of Manoj Prabhakar, Atul Wassan, Sanjeev Sharma and Vivek Razdan -- all of whom played for a very strong Delhi side.
Saini was the manager of the Delhi team for the Vijay Hazare Trophy in Odisha, where the infamous bust-up between veteran opener Gautam Gambhir and coach KP Bhaskar happened.
It was Saini's confidential report to the DDCA administrator Vikramjit Sen that led to Gambhir getting a suspended sentence.
While he has performed the managerial role at the domestic level, his handling of the Gambhir-Bhaskar episode came in for some flak from some quarters.
The BCCI will now abolish the system of doling out junkets to state association officials and as per COA diktat will have professional administrative managers for all the representative national teams be it senior, A or Under-19.
