It’s one of Australian sport’s most enduring clichés, popularised by Ian Chappell and flogged to its last, shallow breath by Shane Warne: in cricket, the coach is the thing with four wheels that transports you around England during the Ashes.
That is a criticism Australia’s current gaffer Darren Lehmann confronts head-on in his mid-reign effort Coach (Edbury Press, $39.99, released 31 October) – one among a glut of cricket books piled onto store shelves as the Australian summer approaches, in a fortnight that suggests the old-fashioned format is not only in rude health, but also serves as the primary medium of communication between the generation of players under Lehmann’s command.
Lehmann and his co-writer Brian Murgatroyd sought to lay out the philosophies that have underpinned one of the least-likely top-level coaching careers in this era of diet science and hyper-professionalism. As an explanation of the Tao of Boof, it’s certainly a vast improvement on the 2005 Lehmann-James Brayshaw collaboration Worth The Wait, which wasn’t.
If book buyers are to judge current selections by their covers, Lehmann perhaps hasn’t put his best foot forward here, incongruously depicted in a shabby business shirt, rolled up at the sleeves to reveal one of those FitBit wrist bands. I might be the only person in the world to suggest a tightly-cropped, David Bailey-style black and white close-up of Lehmann’s grimly-fascinating head might have actually been preferable in this case.
The coach’s stated aim this time, beyond the obvious, was to explain “what I do and why I do it”, and to “pull back the curtain and offer an insight into all the work and all the thought that goes on behind the scenes to try and ensure the Australian cricket team is the best in the world,” a task that is currently providing plenty of challenges. In any case, Lehmann is the man contracted to do it until Australia’s 2019 Cricket World Cup and Ashes campaigns are done with, which precludes him from landing any out and out haymakers.
Still, in decent chunks of this book he fulfils his brief, re-emphasising the punishing nature of the international cricket schedule, in which players and coaches like Lehmann sign up for somewhere in the vicinity of 300 days per year away from home. When Lehmann was offered the role at the end of a four-month stint away coaching Queensland, IPL franchise Kings XI Punjab and Australia A’s 2013 tour of England, his incredulous and typically earthy reply to CA high performance manager Pat Howard was: “Fuck off!”
In that light, its difficult to imagine the South Australian ever disclaiming himself as a “Svengali” in actual conversation, but otherwise Murgatroyd does well at adopting Lehmann’s no-frills drawl, while remaining at pains to point out he’s a little more evolved as a coach than we often give him credit for. Or in Lehmann’s words, “I am as new age as they come in terms of many of my methods.” That his own international career was limited to just 27 Tests on account of a relaxed approach to certain physical commitments means his mantra these days roughly equates to: “do as I didn’t.”
Of great interest here is the aptly-titled second chapter, “The Rise of a Coach”, which dovetails quite fascinatingly with one of the chief gripes of Lehmann’s former colleague Michael Clarke in his own recently-released effort; that the powers of the national captain have been been drastically stripped back since Lehmann took over from the more skipper-friendly Micky Arthur.
Says Lehmann in a passage rich with subtext:
When I was playing for Australia the team manager – back then it was Steve Bernard, the former NSW seam bowler and now an ICC match referree – was the person in charge of the squad and everyone, even the head coach, answered to him. But that has changed and the buck now stops with me. By going down that path cricket has merely followed other sports like soccer, the rugby codes, Australian rules football – you name it, every sport I can think of is the same now. Ultimately someone has to be responsible and that is the lot of the head coach.
“You might argue that is unfair given I don’t set foot on the field throughout any given match, but in this era in which millions and even billions of dollars are invested in the game, someone has to be accountable and that someone is me. And although I might not like it, I would not have it any other way. I have seen the pressure that comes with leading the side on the field, a job that caused John Howard to once observe his role as prime minister was second in importance to that of the Australia captain. On that basis my primary job is to take as much of the heat, preparation and organisational responsibility as I can on to my own plate while, at the same time, allowing the captain to be his own man out on the field and also to allow him to perform to the best of his abilities as a player. If I can do that then I say that I have done at least part of my job.
Part of your job, yes, but also a gradual and possibly permanent absorption of responsibilities which used to be the domain of the Test captain, these days a leader of his men in a mostly ceremonial sense. You set the field and rotate the bowlers we’ve allowed you, Smudge, and we’ll take care of the rest. The point not made here is to what ends it actually does benefit a captain to be relieved of so many “responsibilities”. Clarke positions the indignity somewhere in the realm of castration.
Lehmann gets to the point better when it comes to the Brad Haddin selection controversy of the 2015 Ashes tour, in which the Australian keeper stuck to the coach’s own “family first” philosophy to his own detriment, returning home to be with his sick daughter and in the process being permanently usurped as Australia’s custodian by fellow New South Welshman Peter Nevill.
The real problem, according to the coach, was that Haddin was even picked in the first place, a suggestion that opens up a decent sized can of worms. “I allowed my love for him as a player and a team man to cloud my judgment,” Lehmann writes, “With my experience, I should have known better.”
Ditto Shane Watson. “I knew in my heart of hearts they had run their race at Test level,” writes the coach. Who needs “new age” methods when you can defer to gut feel, eh? That Australia so convincingly lost the first Test of that series in Cardiff, and eventually the series, seems obvious in hindsight given the coach’s pessimism regarding two of his most important senior players.
Yet “what needs to be known” about all that, Lehmann writes with newfound certainty, is that the Haddin-Watson situation was unavoidable; Australia “had” to pick a single squad for the back-to-back Test engagements in the West Indies and England. But did they really? Couldn’t that very scenario have been reasonably foreseen in this day and age? That doesn’t read like the buck stopping with Lehmann.
Perhaps the most obvious item of interest here, given recent events, is the Australian coach’s views on the tragic death of Phillip Hughes, in whose official, family-endorsed, posthumous biography Lehmann’s voice was absent. The coach was attending to administrative duties when he learned of Hughes’ grave situation from South Australian coach and former team-mate Darren Berry, a grim turn of events that made him think immediately of what the pair had endured on 18 January 2004, when Berry and Lehmann witnessed the senseless death of another left-handed Australian wunderkind – their friend David Hookes.
If nothing else, the loss of his cricketing mentor Hookes prepared Lehmann for the wildly contrasting reactions Hughes’ death would draw from each of his team-mates. Among some fascinating snippets from the period, Lehmann details the use of dancing to diffuse awkwardness in the Australian squad, and remembers the blistering heat in Macksville on 3 December, when the Australian team’s “little mate” was farewelled, adding the poignant detail of Victorian fast bowler John Hastings becoming so sweat-drenched among the mourners that he had to remove his shirt and wring it out before putting it back on.
Before his players gathered for the rescheduled start to that 2014-15 summer and the eventual triumph of the Adelaide Test, Lehmann sent a heartfelt memo, which concluded: “Take care. Love you with all my heart and want to protect you all as best as we all can. Coach.”
Not every page of Coach reveals Lehmann in a sympathetic light, but it does deliver you right back to an endearing warning in its preface (italics added): “It is not the book of someone who claims to be the perfect international cricket coach.” Honesty is often the best policy.
