Justin Langer retirement whispers: will the Australia coach get it right?

Justin Langer nailed his first retirement in 2008 but the challenge for the under pressure Australia coach is if he can get it right a second time.

Justin Langer (second from left) with a couple of legends.

On the eve of the 2008 New Year’s Test, Justin Langer slipped into the old press room at the SCG and announced that, like Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath, he would be calling it a day.

The others might have had more celebrated careers and retirements which had resembled farewell tours, but his quiet exit was more memorable for the words he spoke after placing his baggy green down on the desk in front of him.

“There hasn’t been a waking moment in the last 20 years where I haven’t thought about playing Test cricket and wearing the baggy green cap, so this is a tough moment,” he said.

“Everyone keeps saying ‘you’ll know when it’s time. Well at one o’clock two days ago I knew it was time – it just came to me.”

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Here was a man not blessed with the natural talents of the other retirees, but one who had got everything out of himself. And then some. A man who deserved his place in this champion team.

Australia was 4-0 up at that point and would complete a 5-0 clean sweep, an era and a series ended with that Sydney Test.

The Ashes summer of 2021-22 seemed to be the perfect place for Langer to make the call on his coaching career.

His contract is up, it is the start of another Ashes cycle and while the man has limitless passion and energy, every coach and their methods have a use by date, with the odd exception.

Justin Langer (second from left) with a couple of legends.

Coaches like Langer, coaches who spend every waking moment possessed by the game, might have a more limited tenure than others if only for their own sake.

Langer deserves to go out on his own terms, but this is a situation which seems to have come to a head because of these fevered times.

Langer gives cricket everything he has to give, like the celebrated character from The Thick of It, Malcolm Tucker, he sweats spinal fluid for the job.

Langer does not deserve to have his reputation questioned or tarnished over a relatively minor incident with a journalist in a Bangladesh breakfast room, but the attention the event gained and the uncertainty it has caused suggests things are on something of a hair trigger.

You can only imagine the funk coach and players are in right now. They’ve been double crossed by a South Australian government which had promised them a quarantine arrangement that would allow them to train and they are locked in their rooms.

Justin Langer at the Gabba. Picture: Patrick Hamilton/AFP

They’re stewing in their own juices over the performances in Bangladesh and the West Indies, few of the players can take any positives from their performances and many know they wasted an opportunity to secure a World Cup berth. For that they could choose to blame themselves or point to decisions made by selectors and coaches.

The fixtures for Australia’s T20 World Cup campaign dropped on Tuesday, they and the squad for which will be announced later in the week should be at the front of the country’s cricket conversation but they are not.

Rumblings of discontent between coach and players have filled the vacuum created by the lack of cricket this year, but they’re not new and should not be so acute.

In the summer of 2018-19 there was angst among the playing group with Langer’s approach and some of that narrative found its way into Amazon’s cricket documentary The Test, but was framed as one of those stumbles on the path toward redemption at an Ashes series in England.

In a debrief session following a loss at the MCG the players and coaches broke into two groups with Tim Paine delegated to bring messages back to a room that includes Langer, David Saker, Brad Haddin and Graeme Hick.

Paine comes back with a bit of this and a bit of that, a bit of beating around the bush and then broaches one topic engaging the team.

“I know that you won’t agree, but they feel they need just a little more positivity, they know now what they are doing wrong, but at times now they feel when they’re going out in the middle worrying too much about that,” Paine said.

“A slightly more positive message around their batting at time.”

That last line triggered one of those smiles from the coach designed to cover thoughts running in another direction.

The two groups were brought together and Usman Khawaja speaks up saying that you can’t always control results but everyone can control their emotions, be more level-headed.

Questioned by Langer about if it is coming from specific people Khawaja does a side-step.

“I think the boys are intimidated by you, Alf,” he says. “There’s a bit of walking on egg shells sort of thing … the boys are afraid to say it.”

There is one difference between last summer and that one, the most recent tour and ones in the earlier part of the Langer era and it is that the fishbowl is no longer a metaphor.

Players, coaches and staff are cooped up together for weeks and months at a time with nowhere to go but the cricket ground, no one to be with but themselves and the same group of people and not a lot to reflect on aside from being beaten in the most recent Test series and white ball series.

Winning an Ashes will make everyone better and adding a World Cup win would be an unexpected bonus, but the great concern is whether everyone will get to that point.

Originally published as Justin Langer retirement whispers: will the Australia coach get it right?