JOHN MOONEY will fly off to India this weekend to take up the role of specialist fielding coach to the Delhi Capitals in one of the world’s most prestigious and lucrative sporting tournaments.

Following in the footsteps of Eoin Morgan and more recently left-arm pace bowler Josh Little, the former international all-rounder will become only the third Irishman to be involved in the IPL, or Indian Premier League — by far cricket’s richest jamboree.

After stints as fielding coach with Afghanistan and the West Indies, among others, Mooney has been tasked with improving Delhi’s catching record in a competition where the smallest of margins can be the difference between success and failure.

“The Capitals chance-to-catch percentage over the past three or four years has dropped considerably and while I’ll need to maintain overall fielding standards the brief is really to improve their catching,” he said.

It won’t be Mooney’s first involvement with the franchise as he played for them in a Masters tournament four years ago.

“I didn’t bat or bowl very well but my fielding was good,” he said. “I made some contacts and when I played another Masters in Dubai the coach of my team was Hemang Badani who is also head coach of the Capitals.

“Over the past couple of years we’ve stayed in touch and I got contacted about becoming fielding coach just after Christmas and after a lot of hard work by my agent Niall O’Brien we signed the contracts last week.”

While being coy about what his two-month contract is worth — it’ll only be a fraction of the USD500,000 plus a season Little earned — Mooney said: “The IPL comes with its perks and one of them’s money!”

He is genuinely excited about the prospect of working with superstars such as KL Rahul, Prithvi Shaw, Mitchell Starc and David Miller.

“The thing with many top-level players is that often they reach a stage in their careers where they take it for granted that on the night everything will be alright — but if you don’t look after the basics of body and head positions, and footwork, you’ll drop chances when you’re under pressure.

“At the end of any tournament you can look back at the statistics and it’s usually the better fielding sides that win them.”

Or the side that drops most catches that is eliminated early, as happened to Ireland in the T20 World Cup last month.

“I did hear that Ireland dropped some catches — but I didn’t see it,” Mooney said. “It was disappointing because if they’d beaten Sri Lanka in that first game anything was possible.

“They will probably be remembered as one of the weaker Ireland fielding teams which is unfortunate because when you look back to that first World Cup in 2007, when we were basically amateurs, we hardly dropped a catch in the whole tournament.

“I know the lads these days do work on their fielding but there probably is scope for a specialist person there to bring it along, but not just for the men’s game but for the underage groups and the women too.”

Cricket Ireland do not employ a fielding coach. Have they forgotten one of the old sayings in the game: Catches win matches?