Ex-KKR player David Wiese bringing up coach Chandu Pandit’s ‘militant type’ reputation could also have something to do with the Mumbai man’s emphasis on turning up appropriately as a team

Kolkata Knight Riders head coach Chandrakant Pandit (second from left) with captain Shreyas Iyer, mentor Gautam Gambhir and all-rounder Andre Russell (extreme right)at an Indian Premier League practice session in Visakhapatnam on Tuesday. Pic/PTI

South Africa and Namibia all-rounder David Wiese made headlines recently when he spoke about Kolkata Knight Riders head coach Chandrakant Pandit being “militant” in his coaching approach.

Militant is a strong word even for a tough coach like Pandit and one wonders what exactly the highly accomplished domestic coach enforced in his first year as an IPL coach in 2023 to throw up such an impression.

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“He [Pandit] is known in India as a very militant type of coach. He is very strict, very disciplinarian that type of stuff. Sometimes in franchise cricket, when you have overseas guys who’ve played all over the world, they don’t need anyone coming and telling them how they need to behave, what they need to wear and what they need to do the whole time. So, that was tough,” Wiese was quoted as saying on the Hitman for Hire: A year in the life of a franchise cricketer podcast, recently.

What struck me in the above quote was the bit about Pandit presumably telling his overseas players how to turn up. It could well be that Pandit........

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