Heavy funding cuts to sports will produce players who think for themselves in post-coronavirus era

Easy street for elite athletes will be a thing of the past when we emerge from this coronavirus mess and Queensland Bulls coach Wade Seccombe says a whole new mindset will need to be adopted in order to survive.

Cash-strapped Australian sports are set to head back to the future and at least one senior coach has no qualms about hopping in the time capsule.

Queensland Bulls coach Wade Seccombe quite likes the shape of the world which will greet him on the other side of the coronavirus pandemic.

It’s one he knows well because he used to inhabit it as a player.

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One certainty about the future for professional codes in Australia is that the budget for assistant coaches will be slashed, but the bonus will be the development of players who think more for themselves simply because they have to.

There is a theory that one of the reasons there are a lack of great captains in modern sport is that players are so exhaustively tutored they become sheep, rather than shepherds.

Not any more.

“In my mind, I am expecting the game is going to go back 10 to 15 years in the way we prepare things,” said Seccombe as part of an interview for the Sunday Session in The Sunday Mail.

“It’s actually a good thing. Cricket has had the luxury of being quite a wealthy sport for a period of time and we have to rein it in. We have to be more efficient in what we do.

“In Queensland, we are trying to get players who are more self-determining. That was our focus for the off-season. Let them manage their own programs.

Queensland players, celebrating a Sheffield Shield wicket, will have to think for themselves more once this health crisis is over.

“Coaches are there to facilitate and co-ordinate but ultimately it is their program. They need to get used to making some decisions in life and owning their game.

“That nature of the pandemic has made life that way because we are not going to have as many staff servicing them and they are going to have to stand on their own two feet a little more.”

Bulls coach Wade Seccombe sees the likely change as a good thing.

Wallabies great Jason Little, now a wealthy Sydney businessman, admitted soon after he retired that he missed a plane to the US because he was sitting in the departure lounge subconsciously awaiting the call from the now-absent team manager to go to the boarding gate.

Seccombe does not blame players for leaning on the system. He claims the system made itself too easy to lean on.

“Cricket is to blame for it, to a degree, because we don’t give them the opportunity to lead, to make decisions, and when they are asked to make decisions on the field or in life, they are not accustomed to it,” he said.

“Justin Langer sent me a great tweet from Craig Bellamy, who said this period will teach him a lot, in that he will learn which players he can trust because they will have to get to their required level of fitness all by themselves.

“What a great opportunity to assess his players.”

All of the massive support network of coaches and facilities in Australian cricket does not change the fact that the batting depth behind Queensland Bulls star Marnus Labuschagne is all but non-existent.

The reliance on coaching was spotlighted when Craig McDermott stepped up as a Hall of Fame inductee a few months back and spoke about how, in his first season of international cricket 35 years ago, Australia did not even have a coach.

No one is saying that was the best system. But the right balance between being coached and not being spoilt is the one Australia must now ­attempt to find.

THE GOOD

Grand slam-winning captain Andrew Slack, in explaining why he did not sign a protest letter with other Wallaby captains, claimed he would prefer to add it to “a scheme to update the laws and rid the game of the stop-start affliction that too often prevents rugby being played as it was truly meant to be”. Bullseye. Bravo.

THE BAD

The prospects of the T20 men’s World Cup in Australia in October. The world may be slowly emerging from the global pandemic but it’s still hard to see how 15 overseas teams could be on our shores by October. And would you want to play a World Cup without crowds?

THE UGLY

The performance of stand-in NRL executive Andrew Abdo in handing down “wet lettuce” fines to three players who breached social distancing laws. Pea-hearted performances like that must surely mean he is not the man to take on the position full-time. Those clowns who ignored the warnings could eventually cost the game millions.

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