New Delhi, July 27 (IANS) Varun Aaron has always been addicted to speed. His playing days as an express fast bowler might be behind him, which saw him play nine Tests and as many ODIs for India, apart from being a regular in the IPL and for Jharkhand in domestic cricket.
But the impulse hasn’t faded – Aaron, a product of MRF Pace Foundation in Chennai, still loves all things fast, even as he switches between the worlds of coaching (he was Sunrisers Hyderabad bowling coach in IPL 2026) and broadcasting (in this year’s T20 World Cup and white-ball series in England).
In an exclusive conversation with IANS, ahead of joining Glasgow Cosmic as their bowling coach for the inaugural edition of the European T20 Premier League (ETPL), Aaron opened up on his transition into off-field roles, the influence of Dennis Lillee and Subroto Banerjee, and why coaching at the highest level is less about tactics and more about human connection. Excerpts:
Q. How has life been for you in terms of balancing coaching and broadcasting commitments?
A. It’s been really enjoyable, to be honest, because I feel like I’m really privileged to be able to just do what I love doing. Obviously, I love coaching because there’s no better direct way to impact an athlete or to help somebody out. I think the main tenet of coaching is the want to just help another human being, and the rest follows.
How good you are tactically and technically, all that comes later. But if you don’t want to just help another person, it doesn’t really matter how good you are tactically or technically. But that being said, tactically and technically, I mean, you’re a coach, so you have to be really good at that.
I’m not saying I’m good at that, but I’m just trying to make sure that that’s the vision of what I see as a coach. That you have to be really good tactically and technically, but the most important thing is to help another person out. Then when it comes to broadcasting, I think broadcasting happened very organically.
Before I even announced my retirement from all forms, people at Star asked me if I wanted to do the IPL. They asked me actually to do it five years ago in 2020, but then I didn’t have the time because I was playing the IPL. I was pretty much playing nine months a year, but then when I stopped playing one format, I had more time.
So I did the IPL (in 2025), and I really had a lot of fun. It was fun watching the game through a different lens and fun watching the game actually because I had never been a game watcher. I used to hardly watch cricket. So I would say if you take the last two years of my life and if you told me to give you a ratio, it would be 80-20.
Like, in the last two years, I would have watched 80 games, and throughout my life before that, I would have watched 20 matches. So, it was just an interesting journey, and then coaching happened. Again, very organically, someone called me up, and he was like, ‘Are you interested in coaching and being a bowling coach of Sunrisers?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ So, I mean, I’m really lucky and very blessed that everything has happened very organically.
Q. You’ve worked under very different coaching personalities in your playing career. What are the specific lessons you have taken which in turn have shaped your own fast-bowling coaching philosophy?
A. I think the most influential people in my life have been Dennis Lillee and Subroto Banerjee because they came into my life at very different junctures. I would say three, as it’s a combination because I come from a family of teachers. My mom and grandma were very well-respected teachers in Jamshedpur when I was growing up, and they had a successful nursery school.
So, I mean, coaching at the end of the day is teaching, right? So, I’ve seen them teach since they were kids. The way they go about just handling kids, and they’ve always been friends with kids and stuff like that. So, I think that subconscious learning has always been there by looking at my grandma and my mom.
When it comes to the cricket part of it, I met Dennis Lillee when I was 14, and he imbibed such a sense of work ethic and no-nonsense personality. I mean, when you’re a kid, you’re pretty much a sponge. You pick up anything, the bad, everything that’s around you, especially when you meet somebody like Dennis Lillee, and you spend so much time with him every year.
The lessons he taught me about how to go about my routines, how to make sure that there’s only one thing when you’re a fast bowler and that’s fast bowling – you’ve got to eat, sleep, and breathe fast bowling. When you come to the ground, you’ve just got to make sure you leave everything out there. So, basically, I think the most important thing in life is a work ethic, and that’s what Dennis Lillee taught me. Obviously, he taught me so much about bowling.
He wasn’t teaching me about biomechanics to make it very clear. His coaching style was very much around biomechanics. So he would show us a lot of videos and stuff, which obviously, while you’re working on it, you also learn. Then the whole biomechanics and work ethic part came from Dennis Lillee. Then I met Subroto Banerjee right after my back surgery.
If it wasn’t for Dennis Lillee, I might not have played for India. Then if it wasn’t for Subroto Banerjee, I might not have made my comeback for India because I had a stress fracture, I had a back surgery, and then I was remodelling my action. I found a way myself to remodel my action to come back into cricket. Then I found Subroto Banerjee, who just has this innate ability to simplify bowling, which I’ve not met too many people who have.
So Subroto Banerjee, I think he’s quite a genius as a coach, and I was really lucky to work with him because he just showed me how a very complex problem can have a very simple answer. So the whole biomechanics thing, obviously, when I’m talking about coaching biomechanics and ethics, part of my coaching comes from Dennis Lillee and how to make it really concise and make it very easy for even a toddler to understand a very complex problem comes from Subroto Banerjee.
So I’m always going to be a student of the game till I die. Whatever I know so far, on a subconscious level, obviously, I have my own way of making all this work. But the lessons I’ve learned, and the ideals I follow, are of Dennis Lillee and Subroto Banerjee.
Q. Your own career required navigating painful injury setbacks. How does having gone through that torturous journey make you more of an empathetic coach?
A. Like I said, I feel the first tenet of coaching is to want to help somebody out. The moment you want to help somebody out, I think empathy is the most important part of wanting to help somebody out. So you’re obviously going to want to help that person out, and when you want to help that person out, you’re trying to understand what that person is going through.
You’re trying to resonate with that person’s problem. Look, no athlete in the world wants to go into a practice session or wants to go to a game and fail. So if you just understand that, I think all problems are solved as a coach because, I mean, I’ve been around coaches who, when I was younger, would get angry, ‘Oh, why aren’t you doing this?’ But you can’t really express it when you’re a kid.
Even when you grow up, obviously, you have different ways of showing it. But even at the international level, people sometimes don’t execute plans or play a great game, and it’s not like they don’t want to.
There’s always a reason why they couldn’t have done it mentally or tactically or technically. I think your job as a coach is to find out why that didn’t happen mentally, tactically, or technically and work on that. So that all boils down to empathy. So I think it’s empathy, curiosity, and the ability and patience that you have to have with whoever you’re working with.
–IANS
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