Want success and consistency? The coach should not be a selector

Anyone looking for a new job?

Want to travel the country, sit on your backside watching cricket, determine people’s destinies and the sanity levels of millions of cricket fans?

Well, has Cricket Australia got the gig for you – a selector on the national panel to replace Greg Chappell.

Actually, make that two selectors – in (short) time they’ll be looking for someone to take over from Trevor Hohns as well (I can’t imagine they’d want him to stay on).

Personally, I think they should be looking for three – one to replace Justin Langer.

Because, IMHO, the coach shouldn’t select.

I recognise this opinion is against the current grain of popular thought.

Indeed, some propagate the idea that the coach should be the sole person responsible for selection.

This is despite the fact the Australian coach was only given the power to select following the 2011 Argus Review (given it back, rather – Bob Simpson had this ability until the early 90s when it was taken away.) That review also made the captain a selector – but in 2013 this responsibility was taken off Michael Clarke’s hands, never to return. For whatever reason (actually, not true, I know the reason – desire for power and control), that didn’t happen with the coach.

“Gotta move with the times,” goes the cry. “In football the coach picks the side. Clive Woodward wouldn’t coach cricket because they don’t select.”

But cricket is not football.

A fact forgotten so often by those at Jolimont Street that it bears repeating.

Cricket (any format) is not football (any code).

People keep trying to turn it into football. There’s talk of squads and concussion substitutes and building a winning team and camps and visiting the Dallas Cowboys.

And Alex Ferguson. Dear God, so many cricket coaches dream of being Alex Ferguson.

But cricket is not football.

You don’t have unlimited replacements. You don’t have people on the bench who you can send on to the field and players you can yank off (despite that being the secret fantasy of pretty much every cricket fan ever).

Games can go for up to five days. More things happen on the field that only the players know about. Players are picked from all over the country/state – not just people who are in a contained squad that a coach supervises every week.

Cricket is not football.

(Sorry for the repetition but I know I’m arguing into the wind here.)

How is an Australian coach meant to reasonably comment on the first class form of a person they rarely see play? They have to rely on memory of old games, scorecards and gossip.

End result: a natural bias towards players who they’re familiar with – especially those from their home state. (Exhibit A – Justin Langer and his WA pets).

How is a player meant to be honest with a coach over any issues they’re having (eg mental health, dodgy technique) when that coach has power over whether they get picked or not? You’re not going to get elite honesty.

What happens if the coach takes a personal dislike to a particular player? That’s only human. They can try to fight against that bias but it seeps in.

To make it worse, under the current set up, there is one coach of all three formats. If Justin Langer doesn’t rate you as a player, you have no chance of representing Australia in any format. How is that helpful?

Australia coach Justin Langer looks on during a nets session (Adam Davy/PA via AP)

Now Langer can try to exercise that power as benignly as possible, but it still makes him easily the most powerful man in Australian cricket and if all power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely, etc.

It happened to Don Bradman. For several decades Bradman was easily the most powerful man in Australian cricket when it came to selection. He did a decent, diligent job – but his personal biases meant mistakes were constantly made: no Clarrie Grimmett on the 1938 Ashes tour, no Keith Miller on the 1949 South African tour (at first, anyway), Ian Craig as Test captain over Neil Harvey.

The selectors of the Australian side have an extra obligation to be fair because of their extra power over the players. If Glenn Maxwell is unhappy with his state or Big Bash team, he can always go to another one; but he can’t go to another national side (at the very least, not without a waiting period of several years).

And at the end of the day a coach is just a coach, a position that didn’t even really exist at top level Australian cricket until the 1980s.

There’s only so much a coach can do at international level, isn’t there? How much can you change someone’s game by that stage (to a positive degree, at least)?

How much can you inspire? How many strings can they pull during a game up in the stands? They can help, sure, but aren’t the players and captain more important?

I mean the captain is on the field all day making decisions which the coach can’t/couldn’t make. They need to be empowered. Yet we have a system where the coach can sack the captain – so the coach becomes ultimately in charge of a team where the captain should be king.

One of the arguments goes “well, coaches should select because they’re accountable for the team’s success/failure”. But are they?

Tim Neilsen was sacked after losing the 2010-11 Ashes, sure, and Mickey Arthur was punted for a combination of homeworkgate, losing to India 4-0, Dave Warner punching Joe Root in a bar, and being a foreigner who didn’t play test cricket.

But Lehmann held on to his position despite leading Australia to five Test defeats in a row, two Ashes loses in England, series thrashings in the UAE and Sri Lanka, and sandpaper gate (after which he resigned, he was not sacked). Langer’s held on to his position despite supervising thrashings in the UAE and Australia’s first series loss to India at home.

I can understand why coaches want the power to be able to select – who doesn’t want more control? It doesn’t mean that power should be given to them.

We should have a panel of three selectors – that’s enough to get around deadlocks and to ensure there’s a representative at every Shield game.

The coach and captain should always have input but ultimate responsibility lies with these three, who should be on a contract of no longer than one year.

They don’t have to have played to international level (our greatest selector, Laurie Sawle, never played for Australia) but they should all – repeat, all – have experience selecting for a state side.

They should have earned the right to choosing the national team by their track record as a selector, not because of anything they did on the sports field. The selection panel should include a mixture of ages.

Australian selector Trevor Hohns. (AAP Image/Gillian Ballard)

(Aside – and whoever is spokesperson of selectors should do a course in communication to avoid the constant gaffes of Trevor “how many inconsistent statements can one person pack into a press conference” Hohns whenever asked to explain something. End of aside)

Some pundits push the line “gee it’s hard to get good selectors because the best people earn more money commentating and coaching.” Sorry, don’t believe it.

Commentating/coaching gigs may rule out some “legends” but you can’t tell me that in a country consisting of six states, each with selectors, that you couldn’t t come up with three decent candidates? They don’t have to be “legends”.

And besides, if you ever want the opinion of some blowhard ex-player living off things they did before they turned 35, it’ll be easy enough to find out without giving them actual power.

Everyone who follows cricket is a self-appointed selector – it’s part of the fun of watching the game.

But selection of the national side is a serious job. It deserves to be done seriously, by professionals who have earned their spot, and who have it as their sole focus.

Not the coach.