Ravi Shastri: ‘Rob Key will develop a thick skin. Every day you are judged’

“Oh no, no, don’t go down that route,” replies Ravi Shastri, his familiar baritone laugh bellowing down the phone line from Mumbai when asked if he would be interested in filling the vacant position of England men’s head coach. “Haha. Oh no. Seven years with India – a full-time job, 300 days a year, 1.4bn people judging you every day – that takes its toll. Good luck to anyone who lasts that long.”It was a cheeky inquiry, admittedly, coming midway through a freewheeling chat to discuss the rarely attempted switch from television commentator to running a national team. Rob Key left the Sky box to become the director of England men’s cricket last week and Shastri had noted a line in the Guardian that compared this with his time as India’s equivalent from 2014 to 2016, and then a hugely successful spell as head coach from 2017 until last year, after more than two decades as a broadcaster.

“I had no warning,” he says. “I was commentating at the Oval during India’s [2014] tour of England and came off air to find six or seven missed calls. ‘Seven bloody calls? What’s happened here?’. [The BCCI] just said: ‘We want you to take over, starting tomorrow, at any cost’. I told them I’d have to speak to my family and commercial partners but they just said they would sort all that out. And like that I was straight in from the commentary box. You’ll see when I joined the set-up [during the ODIs], I was still in jeans and loafers. Instantly my job changed.”

It is worth stating at this juncture that while Shastri, like Key, had no coaching qualifications and – bar a brief stint as India’s team manager in 2007 – had spent his retirement from playing behind the microphone, the worlds they walked into are vastly different. With head coaches