Former Kolkata Knight Riders player Akash Chopra has revealed that how the relationship between former KKR coach John Buchanan and Sourav Ganguly turned frosty in the Kolkata campaign to some extent that the former Australian coach gets desperate to remove Sourav Ganguly as a skipper of the team.
Akash Chopra was with the Kolkata Knight Riders squad in the year 2008 and in the beginning, the relationship of Sourav Ganguly and John Buchanan started off in a decent, not but things started to change when the side finished in the sixth position in the first season.
On his youtube Channel Akash Chopra said:
“In the first year of IPL, there was John Buchanan [as coach], [fellow Australian] Ricky Ponting was also there. Sourav Ganguly was the captain. I have seen this from close quarters – their relationship was alright to begin with, but it worsened [with time],”
Former Australian coach John Buchanan who was with the Australian team in the 2003 world cup suggested for a multiple captain theory in the 2009 IPL season, but the theory did not go well with the former Indian captain Sourav Ganguly but he was not taken in the loop when the decision was taken and last year the former KKR coach John Buchanan was said that in his time at KKR later Ganguly had some issue with his decision.
The former Indian national Akash Chopra voiced:
“Buchanan’s way of working was different, and Sourav had a different temperament,”
“In the end, he also wanted to remove Sourav Ganguly from captaincy, which actually happened the following season [in 2009, when Brendon McCullum was named captain], because in the first season, the team came sixth [on the points table], and then they came eighth when Sourav was not the captain.”
In the 2009 season, the rift between Buchanan and Ganguly reached to a new level where the Buchanan wants to remove Sourav Ganguly as a captain and he was succeeded to do so and the New Zealander Brandon Mc Cullum replaced him as a captain, in that season Ganguly manages to score only 189 runs in his 13 games and team Kolkata Knight Riders endured their worst season in IPL.
Chopra Added:
“Eventually, John Buchanan had to leave. Some of the things, because I was privy to that, were overstated, like they talked about making three captains, which was not the case. But, that’s what happens. If one thing is wrong, it becomes a domino effect, other things also go wrong, and it’s said that nothing was good during his leadership,”
“But then, man-management… one thing that I had against him was that he gathered all his friends and associates there, the whole family had come in. There were a lot of [his] people, I mean, that did not go down very well. On the one hand, you carefully pick and choose players [for the squad], on the other hand, the whole family’s travelling with you as support staff. That was all happening.
“It left a little sour taste. It stands out like a sore thumb in KKR’s history.”