Off the field, Nehra's chill vibes powering GT engine

Think of Ashish Nehra and his image of sipping coconut water on a training day springs to mind. Once the IPL is over, the Gujarat Titans head coach will be off to his home in Goa. When Nehra is not planning and plotting for GT, he is usually living a holiday life.

- Rasesh Mandani

Nehra brings to his coaching the same coolness that players and his fellow support staff seem to love. He also has the results to show. This is the third out of four years under Nehra that Titans are in the playoffs. They won the title in their first attempt in 2022 and narrowly lost the 2023 final.

Coaching gigs in IPL, like with managers in football, can be fickle.

Performance is the only barometer in keeping the job. But Nehra, in his relatively short stint, has made a strong pitch for a certain coaching philosophy-strong on team synergy and simplicity of method. Nehra's support staff, whether it is Director of Cricket Vikram Solanki, assistant coach Aashish Kapoor, previous batting coach Gary Kirsten, current batting coach Parthiv Patel, are people who he has worked with before, either as a player or in his previous role as RCB bowling coach. "In this format, you have to watch a team over a two-three-year span. For that, it's important to keep things simple," Nehra said in the franchise's in-house podcast. "Otherwise, in this social media world, once you lose two-three matches, you are rubbished."