New Delhi, Dec 28 (IANS): Five-time Indian Premier League (IPL) champions Mumbai Indians (MI) on Wednesday appointed Arunkumar Jagadeesh as assistant batting coach ahead of the 2023 season of the tournament.

He will be joining the MI support staff where Mark Boucher is the head coach, while Kieron Pollard is the batting coach, followed by Shane Bond and James Pamment as bowling and fielding coaches respectively.

In his playing career, Arunkumar was a right-handed opening batter and a veteran of over 100 first-class games, making 7208 runs while representing Karnataka in the Indian domestic cricket circuit from 1993 to 2008.

After retirement, he turned to coaching, and got success straightaway. Arunkumar was the batting coach of the Karnataka side when they won their back-to-back titles in the Ranji Trophy, the Irani Cup and the Vijay Hazare Trophy in 2013-14 and 2014-15.

His coaching resume also includes coaching in the IPL, where he had served as batting coach when Virender Sehwag was head of cricket operations and strategy at Kings XI Punjab (now Punjab Kings) in 2017.

In domestic cricket, he had worked with Hyderabad side, before becoming head coach of Puducherry for the 2019-20 season. Arunkumar recently worked as the head coach of the United States of America men's cricket team from 2020 till December 2022.

In last week's IPL 2023 mini player auction at Kochi, MI had acquired the services of Australia's fast-bowling all-rounder Cameron Green for a whopping INR 17.5 crores, followed by his countrymate, fast-bowler Jhye Richardson for INR 1.5 crores.

They also picked cricketers like veteran India leg-spinner Piyush Chawla (INR 50 lakhs), uncapped South Africa all-rounder Duan Jansen (INR 20 lakhs), Kerala wicketkeeper-batter Vishnu Vinod (INR 20 lakhs), Mumbai left-arm spinner Shams Mulani (INR 20 lakhs), Punjab left-handed batter Nehal Wadhera (INR 20 lakhs) and Haryana left-arm spinner Raghav Goyal (INR 20 lakhs).