Give Moles a chance to earn stripes
It's unfair to judge Andy Moles negatively simply because many fans and media were plumping for other, more high-profile possibilities
George Binoy
25-Feb-2013
It's unfair to judge Andy Moles negatively simply because many fans and media were plumping for other, more high-profile possibilities. Judge him after he's had enough time in the job to have an effect, writes Mark Richardson in the Herald on Sunday.
The reality is New Zealand Cricket cannot afford high profile, proven international coaching personnel. As we are a less-than-stellar cricket nation we are unlikely to attract them even before the pay packet is disclosed. However, that does not necessarily mean we cannot expect Moles to be an excellent coach. Former great players do not necessarily make great coaches. Coaches with a history of international success with one team may not immediately translate to success with another.
New Zealand Cricket could never be accused of missing the point. Only a matter of days after assembling a search and rescue team including Andy Moles, John Wright and Glenn Turner, the batsmen have once again been forced to activate their emergency locator beacons, this time from central Adelaide, writes Richard Boock in the Sunday Star Times.
John Bracewell failed. There's no point sugar-coating the pill: he was brought in to do a job and, at best, he only did half of it - the easy half, writes Dylan Cleaver in the Herald on Sunday.
But as he crams his kit into his New Zealand Cricket luggage for the final time this week, the more pertinent question is not whether he failed, but why, and how much of that failure is attributable to himself and the environment he either created, or had to work within? The New Zealand team he presided over for his last series looked more like an Emerging Players XI than a Test side. There are players learning how to bat while playing Test cricket. That this has been allowed to happen is in small part attributable to bad luck and in large part to bad management.
I'll leave the niceties to others, but for me John Bracewell is the man who has presided over New Zealand's swan dive towards the empty swimming pool which is the bottom of cricket's Test world rankings, writes Michael Donaldson in the Sunday Star Times.
In the same paper, Donaldson also says, "Certainly the current crop of batsmen are all relatively young in terms of test cricket; the problem is that it seems like it has been this way for the past five years with a succession of unsuccessful opening partnerships".
George Binoy is an assistant editor at ESPNcricinfo