T Lewis: Illingworth Should Not Be Made Scapegoat (01 Apr 1996)

Illingworth should not be made scapegoat for failings

BY TONY LEWIS

RAY Illingworth, who has a consummate knowledge of cricket, and can unravel the tactical and technical knots with innate wisdom, has been removed from the job of England coach.

The same Illingworth, whose selection policy has been hard to fathom and was half-experiment, half-grope, through a difficult winter, is retained as chairman of selectors. Of the two jobs, he has been retained in the one he does worse.

It has been convenient for most commentators to rubbish Illingworth, usually ending up with the convenient epitaph "he was too old to be in touch with the players".

There may be reasons why a change is right, but his technical understanding of the game and his age are not among them. Sir Neville Cardus used to write about "receiving sets", and the biggest inquiry should be about the minds of our cricketers, who failed to receive from him the simple, basic tenets of playing international cricket.

Here is an abridged list of England atrocities for which you must not blame Ray Illingworth - Atherton`s disorientation outside off-stump; Stewart`s leaden footwork and wafting bat, getting approximately, but not exactly, to the pitch of the ball and his running between the wickets.

There was Hick`s wooden play to the on-side, which had him chipping the ball into mid-wicket`s hands in vital matches; Thorpe`s inability to `read` wrist spin.

There was Fairbrother`s life-long insistence on presenting only half the face of the bat from the first ball; Robin Smith`s lunging at spin.

Added to that is Cork`s drifting line towards leg-stump in the last overs; Richard Illingworth`s lack of body action, Gough`s irresponsibility and so on.

England`s cricketers should be mature players at the pinnacle of their profession, but all they have proved, over many years now, is an inability to change details of their play according to the advice of many coaches.

"I know enough about success with Warwickshire to be negative. We`ll be more positive than that."

This proof should be a pillar of the Acfield TCCB working party`s thinking - old dogs do not learn new tricks - and the focus of the whole report should be on the preparation of young players at an age when their talent is being shaped, 14 to 16 years old, and their development thereafter.

But what about a Bob Woolmer, Super-Coach? So often I have heard the comment "what we need is a technical coach and a motivator." Listen to Hansie Cronje, the South African captain, and he will tell you how Woolmer is excellent in a `one-to-one situation`.

Yes, I am sure he is and he does a good job in fine tuning the talent available, but it is wrong to think that Woolmer was as responsible for winning the matches as Illingworth was for losing them.

I said casually to Bob Woolmer out on the square before South Africa`s semi-final against Sri Lanka that however thoroughly you prepare, the 50 overs game was full of mischief: the explosive nature of limited overs can blow the best-planned `pattern` game out of the ground. Bob then said I was too negative, that South Africa would not be like that, and "I know enough about success with Warwickshire to be negative. We`ll be more positive than that."

South Africa began by dropping catches, fumbling in the field and in the end losing narrowly to Sri Lanka after six South African batsmen gave their wickets away to catches in the outfield.

Coaching is fine, and no doubt Bob Woolmer is one of the very best, but coaches should neither be praised for a team`s success nor blamed for their failure. Certainly they should not believe their own publicity. Expert coaching has its important place in the England set-up, and I hope David Lloyd supplies it, but Ray Illingworth`s coaching is not the reason why England have played so badly.

Selection, however, is another matter. England took the remnants of a tired Test team to a World Cup tournament, which required youth and athleticism in the field and an instinct for the one-day game. Instead England players looked as if they were tired, mainly geared for five-day Tests, and they ended up just going through the motions.

Illingworth should take a strong view of the older players and be ruthless in making way for young men with talent, tempermanent and a turn of foot.

The main chance of England winning was with Stewart keeping wicket but Russell played. Craig White has long been overrated and Dermot Reeve under-rated. Cork and Martin were swing bowlers, useful in Tests, but just the right pace to dominate towards the end of a 50- over match.

Richard Illingworth looked fragile in the rough and tumble: Neil Smith should have been first choice. The best days of Robin Smith and Fairbrother are gone. Neil Smith and DeFreitas should never have been used as slogging openers, when it was clear that the men of real talent were the only ones succeeding.

Ray Illingworth can only recover from this fumbling selection sequence by choosing youngsters for this coming summer. He needs to identify a stream of 20-year olds and get out to watch them play; he should take the advice of Micky Stewart, who has been working with young players, and above all be positive and bold.

Illingworth should take a strong view of the older players and be ruthless in making way for young men with talent, tempermanent and a turn of foot.

Then again, you have to ask, if the counties cannot organise the nomination of an England chairman unless by the default of David Graveney, what chance the Acfield working party?

It is long odds-on that we will end up with a dozen specialist coaches, a video-operator, a vicar, three physio-therapists, cricketers in dry suits, nurses in wet-suits, two buckets of sun cream per player, personal PCs, a three-point plug and telephone jack alongside every locker in the dressing room for easier contact with agents, newspapers, families and friends.

When Aravinda de Silva played that wonderful innings against Australia in the World Cup final, I reached for my notebook. Why was he so technically excellent? Because he learned his cricket in one of the countries where school cricket is fiercely competitive and well-ordered. It is like that in South Africa and often in Australia. It is lousy in many parts of Britain.

Surely his team coach Duleep Mendis had been working with him on the tiny details? Mendis told me at Faisalabad: "Aravinda is Aravinda. He has wonderful talent but sometimes throws it all away in a wild moment. There is nothing I can teach him. I just try to tell him what his knock means for the team. Sometimes I have a small effect but not too much."

Why did he control his impetuosity so magnificently as the run-rate required rose? Because he owed the younger players a real match-winning innings, because he could not face defeat by Australia.

The buck stopped with Ray Illingworth because he said he wanted it that way, but the rest of us must not believe that his giving up the coach`s job will make England`s cricket any better.

Source :: Electronic Telegraph (https://www.telegraph.co.uk)