COACHES

Moores: The Pity

No wonder the England Cricket Board is getting a right ticking-off from the media for its prompt appointment of Peter Moores as national coach. Months of fun beckoned speculating about Duncan Fletcher’s successor. Warnie. Moody. Buchs. Boycs. Becks. Posh. It’s so crazy it might work …

There could have been a long list, a short list, a pointy-headed technocrat, a gruff but warm-hearted paterfamilias, and a professional motivator skilled in neurolinguistic programming, with the final choice between a Mitteleuropean savant like the one who takes the Steeple Sinderby Wanderers to the FA Cup in J. L. Carr’s novel and Jeffrey Archer. Instead, we have Moores, who, according to the Cricketers’ Who’s Who I just yanked from the shelf, has seven O-levels and three A-levels. All that can be said authoritatively is that twenty years ago he had a very bad haircut.

Critics of the appointment have been concerned about what it says about English cricket. The essence of their criticism says something perhaps just as interesting. Corporatist thinking so pervades sport that an appointment process not involving headhunters, multiple interviews, strategic plans and psychometric tests now seems hopelessly lacking in rigour. One involving orderly succession must, by definition, be a case of ‘jobs for the boys’.

Is that right, though? Such thinking in the corporate world is now rather outmoded. According to Jim Collins, easily the world’s most influential management thinker, ‘larger-than-life, celebrity leaders who ride in from the outside’ are ‘negatively correlated’ with commercial outperformance. The best leaders are ‘humble but ferocious’: something like a cross between Charles Pooter and Vlad the Impaler, apparently.

There’s no disputing that Tom Moody would have been an outstanding candidate. All the same, one objective in running an organisation – any organisation – is to limit upheavals to those that are genuinely unavoidable. What is the point of grooming successors to important jobs if you do not then permit their succession? Is there nothing to be gained from instilling the feeling in aspiring English coaches that one day, they, too, might coach their country?

In any event, the evaluation of cricket coaches is very far from an exact science. Fletcher’s departure satisfyingly suggests that it’s all about results. But were that the case, a path would surely have been beaten to the door of the most successful national coach of all time – who, it so happens, is about to become available. John Buchanan – for it is he – stands down as Australia’s coach next week after almost eight years. He has just turned fifty-four; the leathery Bob Simpson coached Australia until he was sixty.

The truth is that Buchanan, compared to the charismatic Warne or the articulate Moody, is a faintly ridiculous figure. After his last Test as coach, Ricky Ponting was asked what Buchanan had advised on his final morning in charge. Hmmm: there was ‘control the controllables’; there was ‘play in the moment’; and … well … actually, the last one might have been ‘make poverty history’ for all Ponting could remember.

But something is to be learned from Buchanan, at least in the philosophy behind his appointment. Australia appoints its coaches with its captains and its anticipated teams in mind. Simpson inaugurated the position twenty-one years ago as a tough-talking taskmaster, as the taciturn Allan Border struggled beneath his unwanted burdens of captaincy.

Simpson was not so happy a fit with Border’s more confident successor Mark Taylor, and was replaced by the low-profile Geoff Marsh. Taylor was content to rely on the cumulative cricket wisdom of Steve Waugh, Shane Warne, Ian Healy and Glenn McGrath, and had no use for an éminence grise.

Buchanan took over as coach for Waugh’s first home series as captain. In his diary of that series, Waugh recalls that Buchanan instantly made him ‘very confident about the future’ because ‘many of his ideas and goals are similar to mine’. In other words, he enhanced Waugh’s feeling of control over his own side. It’s arguable that Australia’s team of the talents would have won everything in sight whoever was coaching; but Waugh without Buchanan, I suspect, would not have been nearly so effective a captain.

Similar considerations suggest it is now time for Buchanan to go. Ponting has grown in his job; the advent of Troy Cooley as bowling coach has bolstered the Australian back room; generational turnover is in progress and Buchanan’s successor Tim Nielsen has spent the last two years at Cricket Australia’s Centre of Excellence working alongside many of the young players who will be competing for Test places in the next two.

Similar thinking seems to underlie the appointment of Moores, whose last two years have been spent as director of the ECB Academy. The likelihood is, in fact, that the Ashes of 2009 will be contested by teams whose coaches are English-born keepers turned first-class coaches (Nielsen was born in Forest Gate). Ultimately, though, Moores’ effectiveness as coach will hinge on how he works with whomever captains England. This suggests that the really important appointment is still to come – even if it won’t be nearly so much fun to speculate about.

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A quality assuredly unwanted among cricket coaches is boorish exhibitionism. Which brings us to Geoffrey Boycott. Last week, as Exhibit A in his prosecution of Fletcher, Boycott revealed he had not so long ago received a private request for Tyke-to-Tyke technical advice from Michael Vaughan.

Private? Boycs was having none of that: ‘This winter I had a captain of England requesting to have dinner with me to get my help on his batting but he said he must not be seen with me … Because I have been critical of the coach, an England captain is now frightened to have dinner with me.’ Italics mine – well, his really. Yet is it so surprising that Vaughan should have approached Boycott confidentially? A batsman with technical concerns is hardly likely to advertise them. A captain of England seeking help from an individual who is altogether a stranger to the sensation of quiet satisfaction from a job well done knows he is not entering into a conventional coaching arrangement. If Vaughan wanted to keep his contact with Boycott low-key, it may have been because he feared becoming grist for the mill of a professional controversialist; Boycott’s shameless narcissism in revealing the approach is Exhibit Z5473 in the case for having nothing to do with him. Boycott once complained that the cricket establishment wanted his expertise but didn’t seem to want him. It’s odd he should so consistently illustrate why.

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The new Wisden arrived last week, to be pored over, then set aside. To my mind, Wisdens improve with the passing years. After twenty, they are full of enchanting memories; after fifty, they are rich with half-remembered facts; after a hundred, no source more reliably reveals how much and how little has changed.

Recently, as you do, I was reviewing Yorkshire’s 1896 season, when they were ‘batting in wonderful form’ and ‘showed some very brilliant cricket’ – this being before Neville Cardus reimagined the county’s cricketers as a cross between the Amish and the Plymouth Brethren. Against Notts on June 1–3, Wisden recorded, Yorkshire’s hard-hitting opener John Brown was bowled for 107 ‘in foolishly hitting back-handed at a lob’. Sounds like a prototype of the reverse sweep, executed so majestically by Paul Nixon at North Sound three weeks ago. Technical advice from Yorkshire’s opening batsman 110 years ago might have been more interesting than popularly assumed.

The Guardian April 2007