Turner had to be given free hand (16 October 1998)

16 October 1998

Turner had to be given free hand

by Chris Laidlaw

New Zealand cricket is like a hospital patient regularly admitted for self-inflicted wounds.

Glenn Turner's latest book about the game and - if we are to believe him - all the seemingly maladjusted personalities that populate its higher orders, is not so much a hand grenade tossed idly into the tent as a full silo of Exocet missiles fired from point-blank range at meticulously chosen targets all over the pitted landscape of cricket.

Nobody, of course, doubted for a moment that Turner would let fly sooner or later after his departure as the coach, something that was handled with all the finesse of a dump truck driver. The collapse of his relationship with chief executive Christopher Doig - a clash of two innately ballistic personalities - is now part of cricket folklore.

Turner is not the sort of chap who shares power very readily. Alas, neither is Doig. When Turner was appointed it was obvious that the only way he could prosper was by being given a free hand. As it turns out he was given no such thing. He was continually compromised by an administration that simply couldn't bring itself to let him get on with fashioning a team of his own design that would eventually get results.

Knowing Turner, he would certainly have got results. He is a perfectionist; single-minded, calvinistic, and intensely demanding of those around him. But, like John Hart, he is not trusted by many of those in the upper echelons of the administration.

The most telling accusation Turner makes is that he was unable effectively to discipline some of the more obviously puerile members of the test team. Several of these deserved to be dumped and should have been dumped until they grew up. And they are still there, and the disciplinary problems still persist. The hope appears to have been that Steve Rixon's rather more knockabout, conciliatory approach would ease the difficulties created by headstrong, selfish players. Has it? It would seem not. A team with enough talent to win more often than it loses manages the opposite.

It is difficult not to feel sympathy for Glenn Turner. He is a consummate professional and a fierce patriot with a fiery disposition. He wanted to inflict radical surgery on a team that had become a bunch of lotus eaters; undisciplined and self-indulgent. The administration shrank from that. It wanted to keep its more flamboyant stars so fired him instead.

But there is another dimension to it all. Perhaps Turner lacked the kind of management flexibility that is so important in the post-modern era of the sportsman/entertainer. Perhaps his approach was a little one-dimensional; a bit too narrowly focused.

As John Hart has discovered, it is exceptionally difficult to strike the right balance between full-on concentration on a single objective and the need to let off steam. The new professional era puts so much pressure on the minds of young sportsmen that those who manage their lives have to be extraordinarily sensitive to individual needs. Turner needed help on that front. Instead, he got the boot.

Source :: The Christchurch Press (https://www.press.co.nz/)