Indian board appoints coaches for umpires

The Indian board has appointed 13 coaches for umpires and given them the responsibility of monitoring umpiring standards in the country. They will report to Srinivas Venkataraghavan, the board's director of umpiring in India.

The 13-man panel was picked from the 105 umpires who had trained with Simon Taufel over two days in Bangalore last week as part of a three-year agreement between Cricket Australia and the BCCI. At its special general meeting last month, the board had decided all senior domestic tournaments would be video-recorded to tag umpires' decisions for eventual analysis.

Each coach will monitor the umpire on video and, at the end of the day's play, discuss his performance with him. The coaches will also talk to captains of the domestic sides for their opinions on the umpires' performance.

"Now we will have four sources of judging an umpire: the reports from match referees and from captains, video-recording of matches and the [umpire] coaches," MP Pandove, BCCI's joint-secretary, told the Times of India. "Above all, Venkat will monitor their progress."

Umpire-coach panel: Borni Jamula, Subroto Porel, Subrata Banerjee, AL Narasimhan, Jasbir Singh, Vijay Chopra, RS Rathore, Shyam Bansal, BK Sadashiva, Tej Handu, Narendra Menon, VK Ramaswamy, KS Giridharan .