Greg Chappell: Not Out: From India to Ball Tampering to Australian Cricket's Future by Greg Chappell

Author:Greg Chappell [Chappell, Greg]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Sports & Recreation, Cricket, General
ISBN: 9781743587676
Google: K6E2EAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Published: 2021-11-03T23:32:53.712990+00:00

12

SELECTOR, AGAIN

Australia, 2010–2011

In early 2011, a group of coaches and mentors from Cricket Australia ventured to the United States for a couple of visits with two of the world’s most renowned sporting organisations: baseball’s Boston Red Sox and college football’s Texas Longhorns.

One big similarity struck me more than the differences.

We spent some quality time with Mack Brown, who was at that stage coming towards the end of a 15-year run as head coach of the Longhorns that ended with a win/loss record of 158–48, earning about US$3 million a year. He was essentially the Wayne Bennett of American college football. It was around the time that high-profile recruit Brendan Fevola had been sacked by the AFL’s Brisbane Lions after one chaotic season.

I asked Brown, ‘How do you deal with the really talented but disruptive player?’ His reply was succinct. ‘Each team,’ he said, ‘can afford to have one asshole, and that’s gotta be me! I would rather be beat by them twice a year than deal with them 24/7, because they’ll take 80 per cent of your energy and give you less than 20 per cent of what you need from them.’

One of the most celebrated examples of a strong-willed character was Shane Warne, of course. He worked in the Australian team, both as a young player in the era of Allan Border, David Boon, Mark Taylor, the Waugh brothers and Ian Healy, and then in later years as a senior one, because the vast majority of the characters around him were all strong and mature individuals. If Shane had come into the team in the mid-1980s with that unsteady young team around Allan, it might not have worked quite as well. Border would have struggled to manage it on his own, and the other players would not have been sure enough of their own ground to step in. Even with the experience and the talent of the team in the 1990s, and then the later group under Steve Waugh and then Ricky Ponting, he was still a disruption. But at least when he was on the field, he gave you what you needed.

So in evaluating where your team is at, you can take more risks when you’ve got a mature group in that sense, with those mercurial sorts of players.

In assessing a player, you generally want to be getting a feel for them as a person as well as a cricketer, and that’s where spending time around them early on at under-age, academy or Australia A levels is a real advantage. If they were selected to go to the academy for instance, you knew they had ability. Then it was a case of getting to understand who they were. I found plenty of valuable insights as national talent manager when being around them in the off-season at what is now the National Cricket Centre in Brisbane, and then taking them on tours and really getting to understand how they operated.

From that you’d get a pretty good idea of who

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