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They say there are only two kinds of coaches: those who have been sacked, and those who are about to be sacked. That leaves out the ones who are about to secretly renege on their contract to go coach a better team, but it still sums the situation up fairly well.
Of late, two Australian national teams’ coaches have lost their jobs. In both cases the coach in question was a foreigner, and in both cases he was replaced by a home-grown and somewhat cuddly true blue, dinkum Aussie.
Mickey Arthur was a man with good credentials, who in his time in charge of the Australian team racked up some pretty good results – a 4-0 defeat of India, for example. He also racked up some dreadful results – a 4-0 defeat by India, for example.
His tenure was a wild pendulum that swung crazily from “We’re on our way, boys!” to “How on earth did that happen?”
He insisted that his players do their homework – in his case many people considered his request a little too literal, although in general it seems that Australia’s cricketers haven’t done enough homework for a few years now.
He was replaced by Darren Lehmann, a man who is said to have “a good cricket brain,” as opposed to previous coaches who perhaps have had good football brains, or good tennis brains, and whose greatest qualification, according to News Ltd reports, would seem to be that he enjoys drinking and smoking.
This may be code for ‘the players like him’, something that didn’t seem to be the case with Arthur.
Robbie Deans also had good credentials, having coached an all-conquering Crusaders side and come from the other side of the Tasman ditch to sort out the Australians with a good, hard New Zealandising, only to be frustrated by a Wallabies group that always looked promising, but could never quite gel the way his Super Rugby teams had.
Deans also had his mighty victories – a Tri-Nations win, underdog triumphs over the All Blacks – and embarrassing losses – Scotland and Samoa – but overall his time in charge was marked by averageness, the Wallabies winning most games they’d be expected to without much flair, and losing with a gallant effort and myriad mistakes those in which they were outmatched on paper.
So often Deans’ Wallabies looked on the brink of a breakthrough, of finally transforming into the slick, powerful team we were dreaming of. It was a continuous false dawn, never better exemplified than in his final Test, when after a stirring victory over a strong Lions side, Australia gave up the decider with barely a whimper.
Deans was criticised throughout his reign for poor selections, and was replaced by Ewen McKenzie, a Wallaby World Cup hero and reminder of more world-beating days in the gold jumper, and a coach who was being pushed hard by supporters way back before Deans even entered the picture.
What interests me whenever a coach finds him or herself in crisis is this: what exactly did they do wrong? And what could they have done right? The reason it interests me is that I don’t think any of we spectators, looking from the outside, can really know.
One thing I strongly feel, for example, is that Deans shouldn’t have picked James O’Connor at flyhalf, because it’s not his best position, and there are better number 10s. But who knows? Maybe he picks Quade Cooper and the Lions run over the top of him and win the first two Tests by fifty.
More importantly, we don’t know just what a coach is doing wrong, because we don’t actually know what a coach is doing. All we see is what the team does out on the field: what has been going on behind the scenes is barely glimpsed, and only through the filter of rumour and speculation do we learn anything about how a team is prepared, trained, motivated.
The thing is, despite constant claims to the contrary, a coach’s job, in any sport, is not to win games. It can’t be. Ross Lyon could tell you how the difference between winning a premiership or not can hang on a single bounce of the ball, far beyond the control of the man in the box. Kevin Sheedy could tell you that with a team of tender rookies without the bodies, the composure, or the skills of more hardened warriors, winning can sometimes be completely off the table as an option.
A coach’s job is, and can only be, to maximise the abilities of the players at his disposal. A coach may, of course, have some influence over which players are on his team, but only to a degree: a club coach can’t sign players who aren’t available, and a national coach can’t pick players who play for other nations.
And how does a coach maximise those abilities? We don’t know. Rod McQueen managed to do it, Robbie Deans didn’t… or did he?
Maybe Deans’ teams really did play as well as they could. Or maybe they didn’t. And if they didn’t, how can we know why?
Was Deans making all the wrong moves on the training paddock? When Australian players fumbled the ball, was it because Deans hadn’t drilled them properly in ball control, or hadn’t managed to engage their full concentration; or was it just because they were error-prone no matter what happened at training?
When they kicked possession away at inopportune times, was it because Deans had instructed them poorly, or was it because, after Deans had instructed them perfectly, they went ahead and ignored his instructions?
Did Australian batsmen throw their wickets away because Mickey Arthur coached badly, or because they were incapable of following his coaching when out in the middle? Were the bowlers wayward because the plan was wrong, or because they didn’t stick to it.
In the AFL, Mark Neeld was a high-profile victim of the coaching carousel this year. His demise wasn’t unusual in this cutthroat game, but it was preceded by an unusually long and torrid battery of media speculation. The Melbourne Demons, under Neeld, were just awful, and everyone agreed that his appointment had been a mistake.
But why is that? Were the Demons worse than they would’ve been under someone else? Were the missed targets, dropped marks and lazy second efforts Neeld’s fault for not instilling the right values in his players, or did he do everything humanly possible, only to be let down by a playing group that was simply not up to the rigours of the AFL? And did the remorseless media attacks themselves contribute to the players’ plummeting confidence?
These are imponderables – we don’t know, and can’t know, because we don’t know what Neeld did, or what he didn’t do. The only measurement we have for coaching performance is winning, and that’s an outcome tragically out of the direct control of any coach.
A bad coach can surely make good players underperform; but a good coach can’t, no matter how brilliant, turn poor players into a great team. He might make them the best they can be, but no coach in the world could bring the current Melbourne list a premiership.
Could any coach in the world have won the Bledisloe Cup in the last few years? Maybe. Could any coach in the world have prevented the rout in India earlier this year? Maybe.
Coaching really is the strangest part of sport: everybody has an opinion on it, but nobody really knows how much difference it makes. Most of us don’t even know what it involves, and so every time we yell “sack the coach”, it’s really nothing more than a guess that our solution is any solution at all.
In the end, the players play the game: the coaches just try to make sure they’re ready to do so. When the players play badly, it could be that the coach failed, or it could be that the coach succeeded, and there was no chance of them playing any better anyway.
Or it could be that the coach did his level best, made no real mistakes, and the players still didn’t fulfil their potential, because somehow the message didn’t get through.
And that may be the secret alchemy of coaching: the ability to get players to listen. Once they stop listening – and it doesn’t matter why they do – the coach has no hope of making anything better.
It could be that, more than bad coaching or poor judgment, the key behind the demise of most coaches is nothing more than that: the fatal breakdown of the magical communication line between coach and players. And so there go Deans and Arthur and Neeld, like thousands before and thousands after them.
Have some sympathy: it’s a hell of a job.