A Tale of Two Coaches
It was less than twenty-four hours between the time England’s cricket coach Chris Silverwood lost his job and his Australian counterpart Justin Langer believing he could no longer do his and resigning. The success levels of these two coaches in the last six months or so could not have been more different with Silverwood presiding over a 2021 which saw England lose more Test matches than any other year and Langer, whose side won the World T20 title (something Australia have never done) and thrashed Silverwood’s England 4–0 in the coveted Ashes just a month ago. Yet they have both met the same fate though in very different circumstances and withe very different options now ahead of them.
Silverwood was brought in after England decided to change Trevor Bayliss at the helm of things. Bayliss had been brought in to bring England’s white ball cricket up to speed and had been hugely successful with Eoin Morgan as captain, playing a shot-a-minute brand of limited overs cricket that saw England rise to the top of the format. This culminated in the winning of the holy grail in 2019, the ICC World Cup. Something that had alluded England with three previous final losses and over twenty years of being miles off getting near the summit. This white ball success though came at the expense of red ball cricket as England, though not quite useless at the format, seemed to be inconsistent and temperamental under Bayliss. Silverwood was brought in to sure things up.
This though never happened. There were of course mitigating circumstances. He never really had his best side. Injury and mental health breaks added to the problems of a covid pandemic and the ECB’s decision to rest and rotate the players for test matches (through strangely never for ODIs or T20s). Silverwood’s side lurched from collapse to collapse and seemed utterly incapable of scoring the runs needed to put opposition under pressure. The times they did it, (Sri Lanka and India thank to Joe Root), they won. This though was few and far between. England’s misfiring top order regularly failed to get the side even 200 runs in a first innings and England were always playing catch up from there. They hardly ever caught up.
Of course this is not the fault of the coach alone. Cricket is an individual sport mostly and most of the batters brought in have failed to adapt to test match cricket and there are many reasons for that. However Silverwood and his coaching staff have been unable to arrest the decline of many of England’s best and brightest young batters, more worrying, many seemed to have declined. Add to this a series of bizarre decisions in selection (four seamers on a dust bowl in India, leaving Broad and Anderson both out at Brisbane, playing Jack Leach on a green top in the same game and then leaving him out on a flat one in Adelaide) and it began to look like the coach was out of his depth.
It would be unfair to miss out on the fact that Joe Root is equally culpable for bad selections and completely at fault with uninspired captaincy on the field, but Silverwood has seemed a dead man walking since England looked hopelessly uncompetitive in Australia. The choice to make him a defacto supremo, incharge of coaching, tactics and selection was a utterly bizarre decision given his inexperience and Silverwood and the man who made that choice, Ashley Giles, have both suffered for it. Silverwood will probably head back to coaching a county side, maybe even Yorkshire who could use a good man with a solid CV, but it is unlikely we will see him at international level again. Such is the stain that follows this ignomy.
Justin Langer had the hardest job in cricket. Australia were a shattered side. their reputation was in tatters post ‘sandpapergate’ and they had just seen their captain and world class opener banned for it. Langer’s responsibility was the rebuild the image of the side and get results back to scratch. Neither was going to be an easy thing given the ill-feeling for the cricket team across the world and even back home. The cheating affair had hit hard at the heart of Aussie sport and the whole ‘hard but fair’ thing was biting in the worst way. Australia had to look themselves hard at the mirror and Langer was the one to show them what they were seeing.
It has to be said he did a reasonable job. He brought through a quartet of quick bowlers, the likes the country had not seen in years and armed with it results improved. There were setbacks. The side shorn of Smith and Warner lost to India for the first time ever at home and then again, with Smith and Warner back, India beat the Aussies again in their back yard, this time shorn of their top stars themselves. However, Langer oversaw a drawn series in England which meant that Australia had not lost in that country in a test series for the first time since 2001 and kept hold of that coveted urn. Limited overs cricket was another story though with Australia being inconsistent and mostly a non-event. They were easily beaten by England in the semis of the ICC World Cup despite beating the English in the qualifying round and T20 was never a priority for them, even losing a series in Bangladesh, where Langer seemed to lose his rag with the Cricket Australia website for posting a video of the Bangladeshi side celebrating.
This was Langer’s problem. Even when the side was winning, the constant stream of news coming out of the dressing room of his methods was a sour point. He was too intense, too involved, too all encompassing. This was proving difficult for many senior players in the squad who wanted to be left to their own devices to think about their performance. Langer wanted more and more, not a bad thing in a high pressure environment, but there was considerable push back about the way he went about it. Post the India series in 2020 there was a discussion with Langer to mellow out a little. He did, and Australia seemingly followed that with the T20 World Cup win and the Ashes victory. But the murmurs from players continued. Remarks from the ODI captain and the new test captain, also Australia’s blue-eyed boy, were never completely affirmative to the coach and it seems ultimately, it is what has done for Langer.
The mess that Cricket Australia have made in their handling of this though is what is most upsetting. You can side with players or the coach but Cricket Australia seemingly wanted to do neither, pushing one against the other and almost washing their hands of a decision and waiting till Langer himself jumped. Knowing he wanted a longer contract they offered a humiliating 6 month contract fully expecting the former Aussie legend to walk away. He did just that and the Board got to write the usual ‘thank for everything’ press release. Cricket Australia continues to blunder from one mess to another. You can say they have over reacted with Sandpapergate, made a mess of Tim Paine’s career in the texting scandal and now seemingly have lost Langer from the coaching stocks with their indecision and incompetence. Langer will have his pick of opportunities. IPL gigs, BBL roles and even more worrying for Cricket Australia and all those who burned him, maybe even the England job. What money on Langer as England coach vs Australia in the Ashes in 2023? I am hear for it.
