Everyone needs a coach

In England the new year has begun with a row, as the simmering dissatisfaction with Peter Moores as head coach of Team England boils over into the public domain. My estimate is that Moores is now a dead man walking since neither the current captain nor his predecessor seem to have any confidence in him, and that makes his position just about untenable.

I have to disagree with Samir’s scepticism about the value of international coaches. A coach is as important to an international team as a wicketkeeper: a great one can be the fulcrum of a side and a bad one can be a major weakness.

At the most basic level, every player has occasional need to work on eradicating faults in his technique or improving his play against different types of opposition or in different conditions. And on the international merry-go-round, players are continually experiencing things for the first time. With the possible exceptions of very stable great teams, every touring party includes players who have never played in or against India or England or Australia or wherever it is. With hardly any time now spent in-country before the first Test, someone has to be the fount of knowledge about conditions and opposition on whom at least the newbies, but more usually also the experienced ones, can call. And someone has to make sure that there will be the proper facilities for practice, that there will be enough net bowlers of the right types, and so on.

What a good coach does is make sure that his players are as well-equipped to play the next game as they can be, but who is best to do that differs for any group of players.

John Buchanan was a great success with Queensland and Australia but a disaster with Middlesex. He was hampered in part by reactionary forces in the county club, but the fundamental problem was that he was simply too advanced for a team of youngsters. He was a professor trying to conduct postgraduate seminars on advanced cricket science with students still struggling with their secondary school leaving exams.

Moores was a hugely successful coach of Sussex but he had grown up with the club, playing for them for 14 seasons, one as captain, before being appointed coach. Just about all his players were ones whose development he had overseen and who had responded to his coaching from an early age. He seems to be brilliant at basic skills, but first Vaughan and now Pietersen (and several senior players if the rumours are true) have found him unable to deliver the expert-level training they require, and found him inflexible in his methods.

Stephen identified Duncan Fletcher’s advice as a likely factor in South Africa’s defeat of Australia as it most certainly had been in England’s in 2005, and as it certainly was when Glamorgan won the county championship in the 1990s. He seems to have a magic touch with any team.

One of the main reasons for his success is his own understanding of what he is for. He sees himself as a consultant, not a dictator. In an argument with the captain, the captain always has the last word and makes the final decision. The press may have talked of “Fletcher’s England”, but Fletcher thought it was Hussain’s England or Vaughan’s England or Flintoff’s England and behaved accordingly.

He isn’t unique, of course. The late Bob Woolmer, John Buchanan, John Wright and Graham Ford have all operated in roughly similar fashion and have achieved a fair amount of success.

What does not work is allowing the coach to assume serious authority. Most failures as coaches fail because the players they are meant to serve object to being treated as puppets or naughty children. The worst examples are Ray Illingworth and John Bracewell, who demanded supreme powers and ruled with an iron hand, in both cases with the result that their teams descended to the foot of the international ranking table.

No, Samir, not just anyone can coach. Not just anyone could be Leo McGarry for Jed Bartlet or Obi-wan Kenobi for Luke Skywalker. But the right man is often the difference between moderate achievement and outstanding success.