Mumbai, Dec 13 : Five-time champions Mumbai Indians have appointed Carl Hopkinson as their new fielding coach ahead of IPL 2025, said the franchise on Friday. Hopkinson replaces James Pamment, who was MI's fielding coach for seven years.

Pamment, a native of New Zealand, was a part of MI's back-to-back title wins in 2019 and 2020. 'We would like to thank him and wish him all the best for his future endeavours,' the franchise said in a statement.

Hopkinson recently finished his stint as England's long-standing fielding coach, a role which he took up in 2018. He was involved in England's ODI World Cup on home soil in 2019 and the T20 World Cup triumph in Australia in November 2022.

Hopkinson was also the head fielding coach for the England U19 team in the 2022 ICC U19 World Cup in the West Indies, where they finished as the runners-up to India after reaching the final for the first time since 1998.

In his playing career for Sussex, Hopkinson played 64 first-class matches, amassing 2,705 runs and averaging 27.60, including scoring three hundreds. He also made 1,400 runs in 92 List A games and 165 runs in 28 T20 games, apart from being a key part of Sussex winning the County Championship in 2007.

His work as the fielding coach began with the Sussex squad in the now-defunct Champions League Twenty20, before being with the side's coaching staff since 2010. He also served as Sussex's second XI Coach between 2012 and 2016, before going into the England set-up in 2018.

For IPL 2025, MI will have Hardik Pandya as captain, alongside a strong Indian quartet of Rohit Sharma, Jasprit Bumrah, Suryakumar Yadav and Tilak Varma. In the last month's mega auction in Jeddah, MI brought in experienced overseas campaigners like Trent Boult, Will Jacks, Ryan Rickleton, Mitchell Santner, Lizaad Williams, and Reece Topley.

They also roped in Indian players like Deepak Chahar, Naman Dhir, Robin Minz, Karn Sharma, Raj Angad Bawa, among others, as well as little-known players like Allah Ghazanfar, Bevon Jacobs, Vignesh Puthur and Venkata Satyanarayana Raju.

/IANS