The Hindu : Sport / Cricket : A side battle between coaches

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Apr 27, 2006

Sport

Sport - Cricket

A side battle between coaches

New Delhi: When India takes on West Indies in a lengthy series of one-dayers and Tests in the Caribbean next month, a side battle would as well be on between the coaches of the two teams — Greg Chappell and Bennett King.

Both coaches are from Australia but while Chappell is one of the legends of the game, belonging to one of the game's first family of cricketers, King has earned his spurs as a modern-day coach with little time for golden oldies.

Dr. Rudi Webster, renowned sports psychologist who has served West Indian cricket as director of the Shell Cricket Academy (SCA), recently lambasted King for his alleged comments in which he described the players of the 1970s as ``dinosaurs''.

Outright lie

King since then has denied he ever made this remark claiming it was ``completely and totally inaccurate, an outright lie.'' It has now surfaced that it was Chappell who attributed the ``dinosaur'' remark to King during a brief visit to the SCA in Grenada in 2004.

Chappell had then expressed his anger on King, stating that those with little playing background were calling the ``players of the 70s as old hat, that we're dinosaurs, that we've got to move on.'' Chappell's comments were then widely reported in the Caribbean media, as well as in international press. ``The reason they're denigrating the players of the past is to isolate them and keep them out of the argument,'' Chappell had then charged. ``They know that if we sat down around a table and debated with them they wouldn't have a leg to stand on.''

Strong language

Typical of Chappell, he had then used very strong language for ``academics and scientists'' like King, with little or no playing experience even at first-class level, as having taken over the game.

``There's a mafia that's grown up in cricket that's promoting a new way and we need some strong people, with intimate knowledge of where the game has come from, to counter them.''

Chappell had then charged that these men had made coaching so regimented, structured and complicated, through the principle of bio-mechanics, that they had taken away the natural enjoyment of cricketers from the game.

``These new methods are not the methods that got us to where we are,'' he had said. ``They have come in subsequent to the development of most of the players in the present Australian team.''

``The more structured you get at an early age, the more it messes you up,'' he had stated.

``Gary Sobers, Viv Richards, Desmond Haynes, all your great players, didn't know what made them play the cover drive or the hook the way they did but could they ever play them! To try to explain to them the bio-mechanics of it all would just confuse them.''

Ironical

Ironically, the claim to fame of Ian Frazer, the assistant to Chappell who practically ``coaches'' the Indian team in the nets and on the field, is that he is a bio-mechanist.

Indeed, Chappell secured the lucrative contract for Frazer from the Indian cricket board on the premise that as a bio-mechanist the latter would be of invaluable help to the Indian team.

It would appear that the great Australian, with his inexhaustible capacity to attract controversy, has already prepared the pitch for a confrontation with the West Indian head coach much before the actual series gets underway next month.

What the Indian board would now think of ``bio-mechanist'' is a different issue altogether. — PTI

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail