Reservations about need for a coach (16 August 1999)

16 August 1999

Reservations about need for a coach

Omar Kureishi

I have some reservations about the usefulness of a coach at a test-team level. What exactly does he contribute? At that level of cricket does a player need to be instructed on the basics of the game? By the time a young man gets to play test cricket, one assumes that he has played enough cricket to know himself what he is doing is right or wrong. A coach, it is said, fine-tunes a player and this is a bit of a myth. Yet a coach has become an eagerly sought super-professional who commands high fees.

I write this in the context of the attempts of the Pakistan Cricket Board, the Ad Hoc version of it, to shop around for a coach and it has been reported that some overtures have been made to Bob Woolmer, the Englishman who is credited with turning around the fortunes of the South African team. Bob Woolmer was the first to introduce hi-tech in coaching and he would be seen sitting in the dressing room with his computer and feeding into it every kind of information. I have no idea whether this information was of any practical use. South Africa is a very good team but that is because they have some excellent players, and have always had them. There was no equivalent of Bob Woolmer when Graham Pollock, Eddie Barlow, Colin Bland, undoubtedly by original inspiration for Jonty Rhodes and Herschelle Gibbs, were around.

The Pakistan team has done very well without a coach, has fared poorly with a coach, losing a home series to Australia and Zimbabwe, and the same coach, Javed Miandad, getting positive results on the tour of India and in the Asian Test championship. The difference was the captaincy. Indeed Pakistan played the World Cup with a coach who had been hastily drafted, and reached the finals. The influence of the hastily drafted coach could have been only marginal. England have kept changing coaches with no significant improvement in the results. When the West Indies were ruling the cricket world, they had no coach but they too are looking around for a coach.

Bangladesh is a priceless case in point. They had Gordon Greenidge and they won the ICC Trophy and they fired Greenidge. He was re-hired for the World Cup and Bangladesh not only was able to beat Scotland but indeed Pakistan, the mother of all upsets. Coinciding with the famous victory was the re-firing of Gordon Greenidge and Bangladesh too is in the market for a coach. They are looking to Eddie Barlow.

I have spoken to innumerable test players, those that are playing currently, and asked them whether the attaching of a coach with a team has made any difference. They have generally been polite and stressed that the coach has been useful in raising the fielding standards. But what about batting or bowling? We occasionally get some useful tips, they have said. But given that a big-name coach costs a fair packet, is it money well spent? They were not so sure. I think the game of cricket is being needlessly complicated. A team needs a good captain and a manager who looks after administrative matters and can function as the spokesman of the team in handling media. It doesn't need a clutch of experts and sub-experts, batting, bowling, fielding coaches, psychiatrists, nutritionists and cheer-leaders. This is a kind of Parkinson's law, the assistant needs an assistant and the assistant to the assistant needs an assistant. Keep it simple, is what I would recommend. Talent without, with or without a coach.

I can understand the need for a coach at a certain junior level. When I was in my final year in school in Bombay, in what was called the Senior Cambridge year, I started to play club cricket and the standard was several notches higher than school cricket. My club, the Young Men's Muslim Association (YMMA) hired the services of a coach, the admirable Mr Vajifdar who had been a left-arm spinner and had played for the Parsis in the Bombay Pentangular and for Bombay in the Ranji Trophy. While he imparted some general coaching, he would take us individually and iron out any technical faults. But his message was simple: cricket is a thinking man's game but he (the coach) couldn't do the thinking for us. Cricket needed concentration and discipline. If we understood this, that was all the coaching we needed. Batting was about shot-selection, bowling about line and length. It sounded elementary but I found that I had become a better player." Obviously I can't coach batsmen like Vijay Merchant and Hazare. They're already reached the top. But I can help duffers like you," he would say. That's the point. Put crudely, you can't teach an old dog new tricks.

Since modern cricket is all about winning, the coach can't teach a team how to win. Bob Woolmer may have done a great job with the South African team but when it came to the crunch, in the semi-final of the World Cup, the South Africans lost their nerve. Bob Woolmer can't be held responsible for this but then what is the use of a super-coached team if it chokes when it matters most?

Source :: The Dawn (www.dawn.com)