Why Emburey?

Emburey?

It isn't just that he was coaching a minor counties side not so long ago. Nor that he was fired by Northants. Or that Middlesex, the team he subsequently coached, was relegated. These details don't make up a great resumé, obviously, but they aren't the only reasons why Emburey is such an unlikely coach for India. One reason his name is so perplexing is that he's an English spinner of a certain sort. John Emburey was once what Ashley Giles is now: a containing, life-denying spinner who could bat a bit. To consider an English spinner of this genre as one of two candidates for the job of India coach, is like shortlisting Madan Lal for the job of coaching the West Indies. West Indian fans would be entitled to look reproachfully at Holding and Bishop and Roberts and ask: why him?

But I can guess how his name got there. Consider this scenario, freely and speculatively adapted from real life. You're a member of the coach-hunting committee. You're hostile to the idea of a foreign coach but you know that given the unanimous player preference for one (and the fact that the name they've come up with has respectable coaching credentials) the team's likely to have its way. So to indicate that your opposition counts for something, you strike off one name (Dav Whatmore) because the secretary of the BCCI has had the temerity to pre-empt your deliberations the previous evening by indicating that he was the front-runner for the job. Then, to signpost your contempt for the idea in general you make a short list of two in which the second man is so undistinguished in coaching terms that the only thing that qualifies him for the job is that he's foreign. It helps your cause that in his playing life he was the kind of finger spinner who might have struggled to make it into a strong Ranji side. It's your way of saying to the team: "You're so slavishly fixated on the idea of a foreign coach that you'd pick a lamp post over over an Indian. So here's your lamp post."

Emburey.