Subhadeep Ghosh replaces T Dilip as India’s fielding coach before the Sri Lanka Tests
India dropped five catches in a single T20I in Harare this week. The man hired to fix that is a 57-year-old from Digboi with 17 first-class games behind him and six years at the national academy.
Jul 29, 2026
The BCCI has handed the India men’s fielding brief to Subhadeep Ghosh, who takes over from T Dilip with a Test tour of Sri Lanka just over two weeks away. Dilip’s contract was not extended after India’s white-ball trip to the United Kingdom, and Ghosh will get his first proper look at the group at the four-day warm-up game in Colombo that starts on 7 August.
A hire aimed squarely at the catching
The fielding has not been good enough, and the numbers say so plainly. India put down five catches in the third T20I against Zimbabwe in Harare on 26 July, three of them off Yash Thakur’s bowling. They won the match by 35 runs and completed a 3-0 sweep anyway, but that is close to the most catches India have ever dropped in a T20I where the data exists.
Harare was not where the problem started. The UK tour before it brought missed catches, sloppy ground fielding and errors in the slip cordon, and India lost the T20I series 4-0 and the ODIs 2-1. Gautam Gambhir has spent his time as head coach talking about accountability. Changing the specialist who owns catching practice is about as direct a response as a coaching staff can make.
Dilip had held the job since November 2021, when he replaced R Sridhar, and he became one of the more visible members of the support staff through the medal he handed out to the best fielder after games. He got increasingly inventive with it: the stadium lights killed before the winner’s name went up, groundstaff roped in to hold the placards. Players wanted that medal. It was not enough.
Who Ghosh is
Ghosh is 57 and comes from Digboi in Assam. As a player he batted in the middle order and bowled right-arm off-breaks for Assam and Railways between 1994-95 and 2004-05, and the record is a modest one: 17 first-class matches, 17 List A games. He was better known for how he moved in the field than for anything he did with the bat, which is a reasonable enough qualification for the job he has just been handed.
The coaching side is where the weight sits. Ghosh has spent six or seven years at the national academy, worked with India A and took the Under-19 side to the 2024 World Cup. He was the fielding coach for the India women’s team on their multi-format tour of Australia in 2021, and he has been doing the same job at Delhi Capitals. He was also on the Kolkata Knight Riders staff for the 2014 IPL title, won under Gambhir’s captaincy, so the head coach has known him a long time.
Most of the younger players in the Test squad have already worked with him somewhere on the way up, through India A or the age-group sides. That should shorten the settling-in period, which matters when the first assignment is a fortnight away.
Galle first, and not an easy start
The two Tests are a World Test Championship assignment and India’s first Test tour of the island since 2017, when they won 3-0. Galle hosts the opener from 15 to 19 August, then the sides move to the Sinhalese Sports Club in Colombo from 23 to 27 August. Shubman Gill captains, KL Rahul is his deputy, Ravindra Jadeja returns after the tennis elbow that cut short his IPL 2026, and the uncapped spinner Saransh Jain is in a senior India squad for the first time.
Sri Lanka is a hard place to start a fielding project. Galle puts the load on the close catchers, because the spinners bowl most of the overs and the chances that decide sessions come at short leg, slip and silly point rather than in the deep. A bat-pad chance shelled on the second afternoon there costs a good deal more than a dropped outfield catch in Harare.
Ghosh is not arriving alone into a settled room, either. Ryan ten Doeschate has stepped away from the assistant coach role and is heading back to KKR, so Gambhir takes a changed staff to Sri Lanka.
Fielding coaches rarely get judged on anything as clean as a scoreboard. This one might be. India have been dropping catches, and the man hired to stop it has a fortnight of preparation and then five days in Galle.