IPL turns 18: The rise of football manager style strong coaches

“The pool of captains’ is small. The pool of coaches is bigger,” Mike Hesson who coached Punjab Kings and Royal Challengers Bengaluru in the past tells The Indian Express.

In a league that was once the battlefield of shrewd captains, it’s now beginning to incline towards a combat zone headed by master tacticians and strategists enlisting help from support staff to assist with data. With the franchises moving on from MS Dhoni, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli, Faf du Plessis as captains, the upcoming IPL will have just two captains (Hardik Pandya and Shreyas Iyer) who have had the experience of captaining a championship winning team. And incidentally both are now part of a different franchise, where they are out there to prove it again.

“I think a coach knows his life as well,” says Hesson. “If the team does well, it’s the players, and if the team doesn’t go well, it’s the coach. I mean, that’s the general philosophy and every coach enters knowing that. Every franchise has high expectations, and rightfully so, and you get a period of time to show whether you can turn a team around — whether that means turning them from last into play-off contention, or sustaining a winning culture and winning trophies. Every team is different in the IPL. But I think every franchise has a very high expectation of what the coach can bring,” Hesson says.

And so, IPL is fast moving from being captain-run to being coach-led. While the likes of Stephen Fleming and Mahela Jayawardene mostly restrict themselves to the background, Ashish Nehra, Chandrakant Pandit, Andy Flower, Ricky Ponting, Justin Langer with their animated gestures and signals from the dug-out or near the boundary ropes can easily remind you of Pep Guardiola, Carlo Ancelotti or Mikel Arteta.

While Hesson agrees that the influence of coaches has increased, he prefers striking a balance. “I think that the one beauty you have from the dugout is you can see a completely different perspective. So, I think as long as the coach doesn’t think that he knows best, its fine. A big part of the coach’s job is to work with the players outside of the game so that they’re confident and prepared in their decision making. I think the last thing you want to do is be trying to captain by remote control. I think that really undermines the captain. So, I think there really is a balance,” Hesson says.

In that regard the IPL seems far different to a national team culture where in recent years players have turned their back on coaches who have come across as the command centre.

Dan Weston, who offers strategic services to T20 teams and is currently associated with Birmingham Phoenix in The Hundred, believes coaches need to take more decision making power.

“I think that they’ve sometimes been reluctant to do that. There’s definitely a culture sometimes where players want to do it their own way and coaches can be kind of laid back about that. But I do think that there’s a balance to be had between letting the players run the show and actually having, having a coach who’s very strong tactically. You got to have a strong tactical coach, definitely,” Weston tells this newspaper.

RCB hope to bloom

It is this need for a strong tactical coach that made Royal Challengers Bengaluru turn to Andy Flower who until 2020 had not coached beyond England. But since then, he is amongst the most successful, having coached teams in the IPL, CPL, PSL, ILT20 and The Hundred, winning three titles. In 15 seasons across these tournaments, his teams have made the knockouts on 13 occasions and with RCB being the perennial underachievers, they turned to Flower in 2023 so that he got an opportunity to get familiarised with the franchise and the home conditions in 2024 before building a team of his liking in 2025. It meant, going into the big auction, RCB retained just three players.

And having an inexperienced captain also makes it relatively easier for someone like Flower to put his message across. “If you have an inexperienced captain, they’re going to lean more on the coach to give them strategy. It can be a good thing as a coach because you don’t want to have to be pushing against someone who’s done the captaincy for like 10 years and has really rigid ideas. So actually, it could be a tool for a coach to push their own ideas through,” Weston says.

Delhi, Punjab Kings, LSG ready for strong coach?

And it isn’t just RCB and Flower. At Delhi, Axar Patel will be banking on Hemang Badani, Rishabh Pant will rely on Justin Langer, Shreyas Iyer gets to reunite with Ricky Ponting at Punjab Kings and similarly, Ruturaj Gaikwad and Hardik Pandya will have familiar faces to help them in the middle at Chennai Super Kings and Mumbai Indians.

The downside of it is there have also been instances where at the end of a successful season the coach has run away with the accolades.
Last week, Shreyas believed he didn’t get as much credit as he would have deserved for winning the IPL last year with Gautam Gambhir hogging the limelight as mentor.

Hesson also says it is important for the coaches to not overtly indulge in coaching from the sidelines. “You can offer an objective view, and I think you should, but certainly not send out messages all the time. I think part of your role as a coach is to create a leadership group that can be problem solvers out on the field. I think as a coach, if you’re sending out too many messages, I just think that undermines that whole process. So, in all honesty, I think if it happens too much, it means you haven’t done the work beforehand, in my view,” Hesson says.

All said and done, in a league where you are judged only on results, more than the captains it is the coaches who often face the axe. Given the responsibilities handed out it isn’t surprising that these coaches can no longer be just confined to the dressing room comforts and have to orchestrate the play from the sidelines.