Raj Maru
Eighteen years a professional. Twenty-eight years coaching.
Raj played first-class cricket for Middlesex from 1980 to 1983 and for Hampshire from 1984 to 1998 — a right-hand bat and a slow left-arm orthodox spinner. Hampshire capped him in 1986, and he spent 27 years at the club as player and then coach.
He has coached since 1998: eleven years with the Hampshire Cricket Board as spin bowling coach and performance coach development officer, and sixteen as Director of Cricket at Lancing College. Professional cricketers he is technical spin bowling coach for include Liam Dawson, Mason Crane, Danny Briggs, Alice Capsey and others.
ECB Level III · NCA Advanced · Enhanced DBS · Safeguarding and Protecting Children · First Aid
- 527first-class wickets
- 33.61bowling average
- 213first-class matches for Hampshire
- 27years at Hampshire, playing and coaching
Five hundred and four of those wickets came for Hampshire, in an era when he was sharing an attack with Malcolm Marshall, Cardigan Connor and Shaun Udal — which is to say he took them as the spinner in a side that rarely needed one. He played 102 one-day matches for the county alongside the 213 first-class ones, took another 82 wickets in them, and was part of the Hampshire side that beat Surrey at Lord's to win the NatWest Trophy in 1991 — the county's first. Before all of that he was in the Middlesex age groups from the age of nine, having been spotted at a schools trial by the former England batsman Jack Robertson, and signed his first professional contract at seventeen. He played five Youth Tests and a Youth one-day international for England. Hampshire gave him a benefit in his final season.
He started coaching before he stopped playing, and has not stopped since. From 1998 to 2009 he was spin bowling coach and a performance coach development officer for the Hampshire Cricket Board, working across the whole pathway — under-10s to the first team — and running the county's age-group programmes for both boys and girls. He raised external funding for age-group cricket and development tours, including programmes in Mumbai and Cape Town.
From September 2010 to 2026 he was Director of Cricket at Lancing College, where he ran cricket across the school and built the prep school cricket academy. He chaired the Sussex Independent Schools Cricket Committee from 2014 to 2017. He has also coached Portsmouth Grammar School's first eleven over eight years, and at Magdalen College School, Oxford and the University of Portsmouth, including the women's team.
Earlier, he spent two seasons in Marlborough, New Zealand, coaching in schools and clubs and playing for the regional side. He toured with Hampshire and invitational sides to Canada, the West Indies, Zimbabwe, Barbados, Dubai and Kenya, commentated on cricket for BBC Radio Solent, and has played for the Lord's Taverners.
He lives in Portsmouth and coaches across Hampshire, Sussex and Surrey.
Qualifications
Coaching
- ECB Level III
- NCA Advanced Coach
- NCA Senior Coach Level II
- Former ECB Staff Coach
- PCA Mental Health Mentor to Players
Child safety
- Enhanced DBS check
- Safeguarding and Protecting Children
- First Aid