The Indian Express ·
Sport
Mumbai club cricketer Vinay Iyer will coach Japan against India at the Asian Games
Two decades after a 5.15am bus to Charni Road, he's on the other side of the boundary rope, telling bowlers how to face Smriti Mandhana
Vinay Iyer, a Mumbai club cricketer who once arranged his life around a 5.15am bus to make practice on time, will be on the other side of the boundary rope on Friday, as coach of Japan’s women’s cricket team at the Aichi-Nagoya Asian Games. Their opponents: India.
He knows the Mumbai routine well enough that the memory still comes easily. He would take the early bus from home to Thane railway station, catch a train into the city, and make it to the Police Gymkhana at Charni Road by 7.15 sharp. Practice, then college, then more cricket in the evening. Later, work entered the picture too: practice at Charni Road, office in Andheri, home in Thane. For a while, Iyer kept it up. Eventually, geography won.
Nearly two decades later, cricket has brought him to another commute, another country, and a situation he could scarcely have imagined as a young player crossing Mumbai’s maidans.
“I get goosebumps even now when I think about the match,” Iyer, 41, tells The Indian Express. “I am trying not to show my nervousness to the players.”
There’s something almost surreal about that, for a man who grew up at Thane’s Central Maidan under coach Shekhar Dhuri and at Dadoji Kondadev Stadium, and who still remembers watching Cheteshwar Pujara up close while fielding at point in a West Zone game at the Wankhede.
When the Asian Games draw was announced and Japan learned they would face India, there was excitement among his players. Iyer got caught up in it too. Then the reality of the job began to sink in.
“I started thinking, ‘What’s happening?'” says Iyer, who had to apply for leave from work to be at the Games. “I never thought in my life that I am going to coach, train people and tell them, ‘You are going to face this bowler.’ Or tell a bowler, ‘You are going to bowl to Smriti Mandhana.’”
For someone from Thane, raised inside the demanding ecosystem of Mumbai cricket, it’s a long way to have travelled.
Iyer played the Kanga League for Sundar Cricket Club and captained his college to an inter-collegiate title. Former India cricketer Ashok Mankad, one of his childhood coaches, pushed him toward Ranji opportunities. A possible route through the Navy was delayed, and there was pressure at home to earn. Mankad suggested Kerala instead, where Iyer might have had a shot at state cricket.
His parents weren’t convinced. “My father was like, ‘You will go from here to there, even the ration card will change,'” Iyer laughs.
Eventually, Mankad pointed him toward Rosy Blue, a diamond trading company that played in the Times Shield. Offered a choice between a playing contract and a job, Iyer chose the job. “That day I started working. I’m still in the same company,” he says.
The decision didn’t end his cricket journey. It sent it on a detour, to Japan.
Rosy Blue first sent Iyer to Japan for three months in 2009, then offered him a permanent role in 2013 after he survived the 2011 Tokyo earthquake, having initially said, “I’m not coming back.” He came back anyway, and discovered Japan had cricket. “When I found out there is cricket in Japan, I thought, ‘Okay, let’s try and get into the national team,'” he says.
He joined a Tokyo club, Max CC, and began travelling two hours to Sano for matches, another cricket commute, this time in another country. In 2015, he topped the league’s run charts and was named Player of the Year. Just as a national team spot seemed possible, the Japan Cricket Association changed its rules to bar foreigners.
Rather than walk away, Iyer formed the Kawasaki Knight Riders. Fielding a senior side required building youth teams first, and coaching his own under-12, under-15 and under-19 players, he found his next career.
After Covid, Japan changed its eligibility rules again, and in 2021 he made his international debut. A shoulder injury soon after ended his playing career, and coaching took over: first Japan’s men’s under-16 side, then the under-19 team as an assistant.
On an under-19 tour to Dubai, Iyer ran into former India cricketer Wasim Jaffer. “I had played a couple of games with him at Police Gymkhana,” he says, laughing. “I’m sure he doesn’t remember me.”
The assignment did more than reconnect him with familiar names from Indian cricket. It opened the door to his next job. Japan’s women’s coach, Ardene Ruhode, also worked with the Under-19 programme, and when Ruhode began preparing to leave, he recommended Iyer for the women’s team. In 2025, the former Mumbai club cricketer got the job.
It also meant confronting how different the cricketing worlds of India and Japan really were. “Here, we play on mat wickets. We have camps once a month. It’s not like that since we are going to the Asian Games, we have a three-week camp. No. We are just practising once a month. But the girls are so excited that every week, they are taking leave and going to Sano,” Iyer says.
He’s worked with the groundsman to secure a patch of turf the players can train on. Iyer still holds his day job; the players record videos of their sessions and upload them to an app, letting him monitor and send feedback remotely.
Iyer believes the game could be “a life changer” for his players. For him too, it carries a strange circularity. Once, he was the young Mumbai cricketer rushing across the city before sunrise, squeezing a little more cricket into a life increasingly claimed by trains, buses, college and work.
Now he’s in Japan, on the other side, preparing a team to take on the country that shaped him. Somewhere in that journey, from a 5.15am bus in Thane to telling Japanese bowlers about Smriti Mandhana, lies a twist even Mumbai cricket could not have scripted.
