From time to time you run across something that you can’t let pass without comment, and this time it’s the downright risible suggestion put by former England Rugby coach Sir Clive Woodward in The Daily Mail in an article wonderfully titled The power must be with Flower, not Downton, the selectors or anyone else.
You might remember Sir Clive. He was the coaching genius who won a Rugby World Cup thanks to the golden boot of Jonny Wilkinson and a game plan that seemed to be based around using the rest of the team to generate the opportunities for Jonny to exercise it.
From what I could see that meant using the forward pack to gain penalties in the scrum and at the breakdown and leaving Jonny to do the rest. But I digress…
Actually, Woodward does get one thing right when he says the 5-0 scoreline serves as a sharp reminder of how quickly things can unravel at the highest level of elite sport.
He then goes on to pooh-pooh the role of selection committees and, believe it or not, the captain of the side in picking the team and suggest that selection be left to Flower.
Actually, I hope they do. It’d probably put English cricket back a good ten years while they come to the conclusion that Flower was the wrong man for the job, and then appoint another technocrat to the same head honcho el supremo position.
Woodward, of course, comes from a background where the notion might work, and cites Rugby and Soccer as sports where an all-powerful coach or manager is the way to go.
In those sports, and in Rugby League, that might work. Select a side to go to a World Cup in any of the three codes, or to undertake an old style international tour with a number of tour games interspersed with the Test matches, and you’ll pick a group of thirty to thirty-six players.
That figure more or less equates to a team (your first XI, XIII or XV), a full team of reserves and a bench full of spare players. Take an England Rugby side on a tour of Australia with a couple of Tests, and games against every state and a couple of country teams and you probably need around three dozen players on tour.
And in that environment your coaching supremo can watch what’s going on and select his team. He’s got everyone in one place, and he’s got the State and upcountry games as well as the training paddock to sort out his Test side, with at least two candidates for every spot.
Cricket doesn’t quite work like that.
Even on an old-style Ashes tour, England or Australia only sent a squad of around seventeen players. That was your likely Test side, plus a reserve keeper and a spin bowler, two spare bats and two spare quicks.
In the bullet points at the top of the article, Woodward delivers these three zingers:
• Andy Flower must be allowed to make the key decisions
• At the moment, too many decisions are being made by committee
• Alastair Cook should ignore advice to talk to ex-captains and be himself
And, just for the sake of throwing in a voice from within the England camp, let’s cite Matt Prior: England lacked respect for Alastair Cook and Andy Flower (), where he takes aim at a lack of professionalism by England's players and a loss of respect for their captain and coach.
Read down that article, and you find Prior talking about the importance of a professional attitude and Little things like wearing the right kit, turning up to meetings on time, not five minutes late.
Or, Hughesy suggests without any hint of a tongue in cheek, not handing in your homework.
According to Woodward, too many decisions are being made by committee, but when it comes to cricket selections it’s hard to see how you avoid that.
Cricket coaches at the top level aren’t given large squads to work with. Nor are they ever likely to be.
And unless you’ve got all your top level talent assembled in what amounts to an ongoing training camp I don’t see how you can get away from a selection committee because, in the Australian context, we’ve tended to have a member of the selection panel at every important game.
With every Sheffield Shield game as an important game and the possibility that you’ll have three of them running at the same time as a Test match you’ll want to have four blokes watching…
In England, on the other hand, where you’ve got around eighteen county sides, you mightn’t be able to have someone watching every game, but you’d have trusted observers who you’d trust to deliver an accurate assessment.
How does the Test coach, who is supervising the preparation of his squad, going to get around and assess the credentials of the up and coming players out there? He can’t do that all by himself.
Or maybe he can, using trusted confidants who don’t have official status.
And as for suggestions that Cook should ignore advice to talk to blokes who’ve done his job before, that’s downright laughable.
Cook probably wasn’t the former England Under-19 Stuart Law was referring to when he talked about the bloke who didn’t need to talk to an old-timer in the bar at the Essex County Ground. He did score 214 against the 2005 Australian side, but that was well after Law and Essex parted company.
The important point Law was making was that you can pick up a lot by talking to people who’ve been there and done that, and it’s best done over a jar or two in a free-ranging conversation. You dismiss some things as irrelevant, of course, but there’ll be stuff you’ll find interesting, some of which you’ll file away for future reference.
And former captains, who are used to making assessments of opposition players just might be able to offer the odd insight, even if it’s a half-formed notion along the lines of You know, I always suspected…
But the biggest joke about the Woodward article is the assumption that Flower is the right man for the job in the first place.
I suspect he isn’t, and I’d suggest that Prior’s comments indicate an England camp moving towards the sort of territory Australia found themselves in leading up to the homework affair.
In that sort of circumstance, the answer is not to give the current coaching supremo even more power…
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