Nehra brings to his coaching the same coolness that players and his fellow support staff seem to love. He also has the results to show. This is the third out of four years under Nehra that Titans have entered the playoffs. They won the title in their first attempt in 2022 and lost the 2023 final by the barest of margins.

Coaching gigs in IPL, like with managers in football, can be fickle. Performance is the only barometer in keeping the job. But Nehra, in his relatively short stint, has made a strong pitch for a certain coaching philosophy — strong on team synergy and simplicity of method.

Nehra’s support staff, whether it is Director of Cricket Vikram Solanki, assistant coach Aashish Kapoor, previous batting coach Gary Kirsten, current batting coach Parthiv Patel, are people who he has worked with before, either as a player or in his previous role as Royal Challengers Bengaluru bowling coach.

“In this format, you have to watch a team over a two-three-year span. For that, it’s important to keep things simple,” Nehra said in the franchise’s in-house podcast. “Otherwise, in this social media world, once you lose two-three matches, you are rubbished.”

Similar to Chennai Super Kings, there is little interference from the owners at GT. While MS Dhoni and Stephen Fleming share responsibilities for the men in yellow, Nehra is the taskmaster at GT.

Nehra’s coaching style, though, is distinctly different from CSK. While Fleming may limit conversations during play, and trust players to take their own decisions, Nehra is never short of relaying a message during a live match. He would be by Virat Kohli’s ear at RCB and it’s no different with Gill.

“He is someone who likes to give a lot of inputs. And I am someone who likes to get a lot of inputs on how the game is going. It’s been working really well for us,” Gill recently told the broadcasters.

Does this football-style messaging from the sidelines tend to interfere with bowlers? GT pacer Gerald Coetzee says any information was good as long as it was “clear and not coming from too many voices”.

“Everyone has seen how observant Ashish is. Sometimes, you are in the moment, and he has got a bit of a removed perspective,” Coetzee told HT during a media interaction.

If there is a message to push through in-between overs, a senior pro like Jayant Yadav is chosen. “What Jayant may be able to do, someone else may not,” Nehra told the podcast.

When Jayant Yadav was once asked to transmit a message to Rahul Tewatia during one of the chasing heists, he had the presence of mind, not to say anything, knowing his Haryana teammate was in the zone.

It is a fallacy that Nehra is anti-data and everything he says is instinctive. Usually seated next to Nehra during matches is Sandeep Raju, GT’s talent scout and data analyst. However, what Nehra would never do is use data to give coded signals to a captain on which bowler to introduce next.

Nehra is also respected among the playing group for his game sense. A fast bowler with a brittle body, who touched peak speeds and saw a late performance surge with T20 cricket, Nehra’s chatter has a lot of substance. “Technically, there is not much time to do in these tournaments. It’s mostly tactical stuff,” said Coetzee. “We do some off-field stuff, like he is really good with explaining different soils and how it relates to the batters while bowling.”

“His meetings are very very personal. He understands what the bowler is trying to do,” said pacer Prasidh Krishna. “The way he assesses the pitch, the conditions, the batters, it comes useful in the game.”

For the first time in the tournament this year, Nehra faces a stiff challenge. Back-to-back losses at the back end of the league phase have seen Titans missing a top-two finish. Twice conceding 230 or more, their bowlers have gone off the boil. GT’s trump card Rashid Khan has been off-colour.

One thing Nehra won’t do is panic. In a format where people have been guilty of overcomplicating, he keeps things simple.