From kicking the bin to Marnus' sandwich: Five defining moments from Justin Langer's time as Australian coach

From taking over at the darkest point in Australian cricket’s history, all the way through to the circumstances surrounding his exit, Justin Langer’s time as Australian coach has been nothing short of tumultuous.

The good? Two successful Ashes retentions over old enemy England, a T20 World Cup title and an honourable semi-final exit in the ODI alternative, and the emergence of long-term batting locks in Marnus Labuschagne and Travis Head under his watchful eye.

The bad? Well, becoming the first Australian team ever to lose a home series to India – twice – the occasional resurfacing of the ‘ugly Australians’ tag he came into the job needing to shake, and most obviously, the growing player discontent that saw him ousted with slim to no public support from those of whom he was in charge.

It’s in the eye of the beholder whether Langer’s triumphs outweigh his inadequacies, but let’s take a closer look now.

Here are five defining moments from JL’s four-year reign at the head of Australian men’s cricket.

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1. ‘Elite honesty’
Stepping into a side beset by issues everywhere you looked following the ‘Sandpapergate’ scandal, Langer’s first priority wasn’t wins – it was to rebuild the fractured reputation of Australian cricket, both internally and externally.

Perhaps ironically given the way things ended for him, one of the first epithets he sought to instil in the Test team was that of ‘elite honesty’. First glimpsed as part of the dressing-room branding during the team’s 2-1 series loss to India in the summer of 2018-19, it was mocked by cricket pundits at the time.

But sappy as it was, the motto was an early sign that things would be different under the stewardship of Langer and Tim Paine to predecessors Darren Lehmann and Steve Smith respectively, which had ended in the disarray of the Cape Town fiasco. This team was going to play tough, but fair – with emphasis on the fair first and foremost rather than the other way around.

“It’s the Australian way as I know it,” Langer said of the motto at the time.

“You look at a bloke or a lady in the face and you tell them the truth and you need to be really honest with yourself because if you’re not you’re kidding yourself.

“The man in the mirror is almost a cliche, but if you want to be successful in life you have got to be able to look yourself in the mirror.

“You can lie to everyone else, but you can’t lie to yourself. So that’s elite honesty to yourself.

“And also, the Aussie way I know it is to look a bloke in the eye, look your sister or your mum in the eyes, and tell them the truth and be happy to get some truth back, so that’s elite honesty.”

(Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

True to their word, the Australian team lost that series, their first ever on home soil to India, but began the process of winning back the respect of the cricket-loving public.

2. The prodigal sons return
Langer’s first major test as coach came in the winter of 2019, with two daunting away assignments in the ODI World Cup and an Ashes tour of England.

Making it even harder was the fact that the suspensions of David Warner and Steve Smith (and Cameron Bancroft, let’s not forget him) had run their course, meaning all were back in the selection frame, though Bancroft was only ever a Test prospect.

“It’s like two brothers coming back home,” Langer said of Smith and Warner’s return for the earlier World Cup assignment. The feeling was mutual: Warner said “It’s like we didn’t really leave”, while Smith proclaimed “It’s almost like we never left”.

The Amazon Prime documentary The Test sheds further light, with Langer’s desire to move on from Sandpapergate without forgetting its impact on full display.

“Cape Town. What do we do? It’s a dark time… for everyone in this room, it should be a really dark time,” he said in a team meeting leading into the World Cup.

“What do we do about it? Well, we learn from it, we’re going to make Australian cricket awesome again and keep moving forward again.”

Fitting the pair back into an in-form ODI team was a struggle, but there was never any doubt Langer would give them every chance to re-integrate themselves into all three formats. The decision to do so swiftly proved wise: Warner was one of the World Cup’s leading run-scorers, while Smith’s 2019 Ashes campaign is already the stuff of cricketing folklore.

Bancroft’s spot, though, was less certain. It would have been an easy decision for a new coach to pin the Cape Town scandal on the lesser of the trio with a permanent exile from the international team. That the Western Australian, and long-term Langer disciple, joined Smith and Warner in slotting straight back into the side for the first Ashes Test was symbolic.

As Geoff Lemon writes in his chronicle of events that year, The Comeback Summer: “Until he [Bancroft] got a comeback chance, it left an unbroken link between the scandal and the present… as long as Bancroft hadn’t come back, the wound wasn’t closed. Smith and Warner wouldn’t shake the tag of having ruined a younger player who they were supposed to lead… if his career was going to end, they needed to end it himself.”

Bancroft’s return would be far from as glorious as the other two, and at the time of writing seems all but finished as a Test prospect. But granting another chance, and in so doing laying to rest the personal toll of Cape Town for the three main culprits, speaks volumes of Langer the person as well as Langer the coach. Most, but not all, for the good.

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3. Kicking the bin
It has become the defining image of The Test: a furious Langer taking his frustrations out on a nearby bin in the final frantic moments of the ‘Miracle of Headingley’.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUosgcX–bo&ab_channel=Prakashkawade

Coming directly after Nathan Lyon’s botched run-out that would have secured the match and series for Australia, the coach’s fury was completely understandable. But that didn’t stop Langer trying to force the filmmakers to remove the scene from the final cut, a tidbit he revealed in an interview with The Grade Cricketer.

“We were able to have things taken out or whatever,” Langer said. “And I said one thing you got to take out is when I kicked the bin. ‘What are you on about? Did you see what you did next?’

“I said, ‘I don’t remember what I did next! Nathan Lyon bloody missed the ball – easiest thing in the world – and I kicked the bin, what do you mean what happened next!? We bloody lost the Test match, that’s what happened next.

“And he goes, ‘No, no, no. You picked up all the bottles! You picked up all the bottles – you guys talk about humility, that’s got to be in there!’ And I went, ‘Oh. OK.’”

As a portent of things to come, though, it was the most forceful example yet of Langer’s famous temper, one of the main sources of friction between himself and the playing group that ultimately led to a fractured relationship, and his resignation.

Having by and large undertaken hiding-to-nothing assignments where wins were on a level pegging to regaining respect on and off the field, the Ashes was clearly going to be Langer’s defining hour as coach, win or lose.

As a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, and displays a passion for Australian cricket few others have ever matched, even the bin could hardly have expected anything less. But perhaps those very same qualities that drove him as a player and as a coach are what eventually made retaining his job untenable in the eyes of his charges.

Equally problematic was his decision to make the team relive the final few moments of that match – painful for some, including Lyon himself.

“I wasn’t overly impressed with going there, rewatching those last 15 overs,” Lyon said on The Test.

“I already did that in my head, over and over and over, I didn’t need to do it again.”

The first seeds of discontent with Langer’s methods had been sown.

(Photo by Steve Bell/Getty Images)

4. Marnus’ sandwich
The summer of 2020-21 is when things started to go wrong for the Langer regime.

For starters, the 2-1 series loss to a threadbare India line-up – finished with names like Washington Sundar, T Natarajan and Navdeep Saini storming Australia’s thirty-year Gabba stronghold – was indisputably the nadir of his time in charge. Add that to the brief but telling returns of the ‘ugly Australian’ persona – chief among them Tim Paine’s ‘at least my teammates like me, d—head’ quip to Ravichandran Ashwin at the flashpoint of the critical third Test – and suddenly the pressure was on.

The crockpot continued to simmer even after the series was run and done. Slowly but surely, the media began to get wind of player discontent in the Australian dressing-room, of a hot-tempered, always intense Langer becoming tiresome amid the already confronting new bio-secure COVID world all were striving to acclimate to.

The most infamous of these leaks was confirmed by Langer himself, in an interview with the Cricket Et Cetera podcast: that Marnus Labuschange had been reprimanded for taking some lunch leftovers onto the field during that Gabba defeat.

“I’m the grumpiest p—k in the world because I told Marnus Labuschagne not to take a toasted ham and cheese sandwich [to the dugout] after his 40-minute lunch break,” he said in February last year.

A few weeks prior, he had told the Sydney Morning Herald: “You’re walking on against India, we’re trying to win a Test match and one of our players walks on with a toasted sandwich in his hand… I spoke to [the player] about it at length yesterday. I said, ‘How do you reckon it looks, mate?’ Is that not something I should say?”

For Langer’s supporters, the incident is a sign of the softness of the players, and that Langer’s hard truths became too much of them reflects more poorly on them than it does the coach. But what can’t be denied is it was the most obvious sign that the end of times was upon us.

5. Patty’s whack
If you’re a Langer fan, the Australian team’s T20 World Cup triumph and 4-0 Ashes win this summer are proof that he remains the right man for the job. If you’re not, those achievements are signs that assistant Andrew McDonald, taking a more active role after Langer responded to player feedback and took more of a back seat across both assignments, is the real architect of those wins.

Andrew McDonald is an important part of Australia’s brains trust. (Photo by Ryan Pierse/Getty Images)

Tim Paine’s, whose partnership with Langer was the cornerstone of the new Australia post-Sandpapergate, resignation in disgrace following his infamous sexting scandal just weeks before the start of the Ashes series didn’t help. Robbed of a key ally in the dressing room, the new man in charge, Pat Cummins, has repeatedly straight-batted opportunities to endorse Langer throughout the summer.

The silence has been deafening when it has come to Cummins’ comments, made even more remarkable by the backdrop of an incredible run of success by Australia across all formats. While quick to admit as recently as last week he has ‘huge respect for JL’ and ‘really like[s] working with him’, backing him in for a contract extension has been a curious oversight from a man whose control of line and length on the cricket pitch are legendary.

“It’s part of speculation which I don’t think is really healthy. I just don’t want to add to it… that’s Cricket Australia’s job. It’s not my job,” Cummins said to media on Thursday, the latest in a long line of dead-bat responses to questions about Langer’s future that have pockmarked the summer as clearly as Scott Boland wickets or Haseeb Hameed failures.

The writing has been, in effect, on the wall for Langer the moment Paine resigned in tears on that fateful Friday afternoon on the 18th of November. For reasons that are as clear as they are difficult to pinpoint directly, Cummins was never going to give a reappointment his blessing.

Perhaps, if nothing else, this is a teachable moment for all future coaches of Australian men’s cricket: regardless of performance, regardless of pedigree, it will be your relationship with the Test captain that counts more than anything else.