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At the end of his five nil Ashes victory speech to the massed crowd at the SCG Ricky Ponting — finally — made a point of thanking the Australian coach, John Buchanan. Better late than never!
Buchanan, in fact, is one of the heroes of the Warne / McGrath / Gilchrist / Hayden / Ponting era and the baggy-greenwash of this Ashes series, World Cup and twelve successive test wins. One reason to explain the lack of recognition he gets is that Australian cricket has always (and probably correctly) distrusted coaches. Bill O’Reilly was always insistent that coaches weren’t worth a good spit on a dry day. He often criticized the modern penchant for coaches in his famously opinionated cricket columns for The Sydney Morning Herald. O’Reilly never forgot being told on his first day at the NSW nets by Arthur Mailey that he’d never make it in big cricket with his unique grip on the ball. O’Reilly ignored the advice and damned coaches ever after.
The O’Reilly hostility to coaches has been continued by the equally opinionated Ian Chappell.
An aggressive, dominating and successful captain himself, Chappell frequently argues for the Australian captain to be the leader of the team, on and off the field. This ideal of captain power was behind his frequent calls for Shane Warne, a larrikin player in the Ian Chappell mould to be captain of Australia.
There can be no argument, though, that Buchanan’s stint as coach has improved the Australian team. Mark Taylor remarked in the Channel 9 commentary box during the Sydney test that Glenn McGrath and Shane Warne weren’t the all-conquering match winners they became in the Stephen Waugh (16 successive test wins) and Ricky Ponting era, Perhaps he should have broken the captain’s bond in the commentary box to acknowledge that Buchanan came into the team structure as coach when Waugh took over the captaincy. The rest is history.
Buchanan’s approach to coaching was a mixture of the visionary and the pragmatic. He toyed, for example, with trying to develop some of the players as switch hitters, able to bat right and left-handed depending on the circumstances, in the baseball manner. He was pragmatic, however, in insisting on aggressive batting and bowling. On the last day of the last test the sentimental notion was to open the bowling with McGrath and Warne. Brett Lee opened with McGrath, Australia’s most deadly opening gambit. At one point it looked as though the McGrath-Lee combination might clean England out before Warne got a bowl. The way the test was finished off also reflected the visionary approach with Matt Hayden hitting a six and then a single.
That six it seems to me is a payback for Bodyline series when Wally Hammond hit a six into the then Sheridan Stand (the general direction of Hayden’s mighty blow) to finish off the Sydney test and the series victory for Douglas Jardine’s England side.