MUM­BAI, In­dia – For­mer West In­dies head coach Phil Sim­mons is among six can­di­dates short­list­ed for the high pro­file po­si­tion of In­dia head coach.

The 56-year-old T&T hard-hit­ting bats­man, who played 26 Tests and 143 One-Day In­ter­na­tion­als for West In­dies be­tween 1987 and 1999, has been joined by for­mer New Zealand coach Mike Hes­son, for­mer Sri Lan­ka coach Tom Moody, ex­pe­ri­enced T20 coach Robin Singh, for­mer In­dia team man­ag­er Lalc­hand Ra­jput and cur­rent In­dia head coach, Ravi Shas­tri.

The can­di­dates will be in­ter­viewed on Fri­day by a three-mem­ber Crick­et Ad­vi­so­ry Com­mit­tee (CAC) which com­pris­es for­mer In­dia crick­eters Kapil Dev, An­shu­man Gaek­wad and Shan­tha Ran­gaswamy.

“The board have fi­nalised a list of six names based on their ex­pe­ri­ence and qual­i­fi­ca­tions for the post,” re­ports here quot­ed an In­di­an Crick­et Board (BC­CI) of­fi­cial as say­ing.

“All the six in­ter­views will be held in Mum­bai with dif­fer­ent time slots for all the six can­di­dates. The in­ter­views will be­gin in the morn­ing and will go on till 5:30 pm on Au­gust 16.”

Sim­mons was ap­point­ed West In­dies head coach fol­low­ing the 2015 World Cup, as a re­place­ment for Bar­ba­di­an and for­mer West In­dies fast bowler, Ot­tis Gib­son.

How­ev­er, he last­ed a lit­tle more than a year be­fore he was sacked six months af­ter over­see­ing the Caribbean side’s dra­mat­ic cap­ture of the 2016 T20 World Cup in In­dia.

Crick­et West In­dies at the time cit­ed “dif­fer­ences in cul­ture and strate­gic ap­proach” as the rea­son be­hind his sack­ing.

He suc­cess­ful­ly sued the gov­ern­ing body for dam­ages and re­ceived a pay­out six months ago.

Sim­mons had pre­vi­ous­ly spent eight years as Ire­land’s coach and last month con­clud­ed a near­ly two-year stint in charge of Afghanistan, over­see­ing their ac­qui­si­tion of Test sta­tus and their maid­en ap­pear­ance at the just con­clud­ed ICC World Cup in Eng­land.

(CMC)