Pat Howard’s exit will spark renewed debate over sports science’s place in cricket

IT WAS always going to be a difficult marriage - Pat Howard and the traditional game of cricket - and now his exit is set to reduce the influence of sports science in the game, writes Robert Craddock.

IT was always going to be a difficult marriage – a fearless, abrasive agent for change and a game of subtlety and nuance happy with the way it was.

This essentially is the story behind the broken marriage between high-performance boss Pat Howard and cricket.

Howard was axed on Wednesday as Australia’s high performance boss.

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It had to happen eventually.

Everyone else up the food chain was axed after the disasters of the Cape Town ball tampering so the man who was responsible for the whole set-up simply had to go as a simple measure of accountability.

His departure will spark an overdue and essential debate about what high performance actually means and whether Australia has taken it in the right direction.

Former Australia coach Darren Lehmann talks with sacked high performance manager Pat Howard.

Are players over-managed to the point they have stopped thinking for themselves? Is that the reason why Australia has not won any of its last seven 50-over games or five Tests?

It’s fine treating batsmen like robots with throwdowns on perfect pitches but how are they coping when they have to think for themselves when the ball swings or spins?

It may sound trendy to defer to sports science and limit the amount of balls a bowler bowls in the nets but what if bowlers need hardening up?

Once Howard leaves, parts of the game will change back to how they were before he arrived.

The next person will come from inside cricket, not another sport and it is likely their powers will be restricted so that they sit beside the national selection chairman rather than over the top of him.

Howard deferred to sports science which tried to monitor sleep patterns and workloads and predict when bowlers were going to break down.

Former Test stars, Brett Lee and Jason Gillespie among them, used to shake their heads at the 40-ball limits bowlers were given in the nets and Ian Chappell once walked out of a briefing with Howard as he talked through the statistics that shaped his view on the game.

Howard loved statistics to the point that chairman of selectors Rod Marsh said he would pick a team with a computer, but he also praised Howard for being a non-nonsense agent for change when Australia needed one.

Howard was no dill.

He had relentless energy and at a time when CA ceased to “own’’ the players like they used to, had the courage to tell players things they did not necessarily enjoy hearing and he often volunteered to take responsibility when things went pear-shaped.

He was in some ways a prisoner of the environment set for him when he was hired after the Argus review in 2011.

Former Cricket Australia CEO James Sutherland and Pat Howard.

Last week’s cultural review lambasted the win-at-all-costs culture which led to the ball tampering affair.

As high performance boss the buck for that culture had to stop with Howard but he might argue “when I was hired I was told we wanted to be No.1 in the world in all formats – that was my specific KPI – so did you want me say we would be happy to be mid-table?’’

Howard never quite got past the fact he was an international rugby player trying to thump the tub and change in a game shaped by so many subtle traditions.

And a game which currently is struggling desperately to get its house in order.