Vin­ode Mam­chan

Leg­endary re­tired South African all rounder Jacques Kallis is now the head coach of the Trin­ba­go Knight Rid­ers team that would com­pete in this year's Hero CPL T20 tour­na­ment.

Kallis was part of the win­ning Red Steel team last year, play­ing as a mar­quee play­er un­der the cap­tain­cy of Dwayne Bra­vo and head coach Si­mon Hel­mot.

The Aus­tralian Hel­mot has been made the as­sis­tant coach of the team, as Kallis takes charge. For­mer West In­dies wick­et­keep­er David Williams was in the T&T Red Steel set up as as­sis­tant coach but he has now re­placed by Hel­mot.

The new man­age­ment of the Trin­ba­go Knight Rid­ers Red Chill­ies En­ter­tain­ment has how­ev­er de­cid­ed to stick with Col­in Bor­de as op­er­a­tions man­ag­er of the fran­chise. Bor­de has a very good record as man­ag­er, hav­ing served at the West In­dies 'A' team and T&T lev­els with suc­cess.

Kallis, was re­cent­ly hired by the Kolkata Knight Rid­ers as their head coach. He suc­ceed­ed Trevor Bayliss, who took over as Eng­land coach in June. Kallis, who has been with the fran­chise since 2011, was the team's bat­ting con­sul­tant in IPL 2015.

Al­though the T&T Red Steel is the de­fend­ing CPL cham­pi­on, there will be sev­er­al changes to the team fol­low­ing the draft in Feb­ru­ary when many of the play­ers from the win­ning squad were over­looked. In ad­di­tion, some of the T&T Red Steel play­ers will be in­volved in the Test se­ries against In­dia, which clash­es with the CPL.

The 2016 CPL starts in Ju­ly and will end on Au­gust 7. The venue for the fi­nals is yet to be de­ter­mined as or­gan­is­ers con­tin­ue ne­go­ti­a­tions with the gov­ern­ments of T&T and Guyana and of­fi­cials in Flori­da.

An de­ci­sion is ex­pect­ed to be an­nounced lat­er this week.