TasWeekend: Coach keeping his calm amid the sporting storm
It’s business as usual for Tasmanian Tigers coach Adam Griffith despite the volatile and unsettling times engulfing Aussie cricket.
Tasmania
Don't miss out on the headlines from Tasmania. Followed categories will be added to My News.
THE mood at Cricket Tasmania’s Hobart headquarters is calm and cheery on a sunny, midweek spring afternoon. The groundsmen rib the state team’s head coach Adam Griffith as he has his photograph taken on the glossy green grounds at Blundstone Arena.
Heads are still rolling at Cricket Australia in the wake of the scathing Longstaff Review into the governing body’s culture, commissioned after the ball tampering scandal at Cape Town, but “it’s business as usual” at Cricket Tasmania.
“[The review] hasn’t changed anything,” says Griffith, who served under (now Australian head coach) Justin Langer in Western Australia as the Warriors bowling coach before being appointed head coach for Tasmania in April last year.
“At the end of the day my job is to win for Tasmania and produce Australian cricketers … I know they are tweaking some rules, and tweaking things that umpires are looking for, and there’s a couple of things we’ve got to be mindful of, but no one has ever come to me and said you’ve got to change the behaviour of your players.
“No one has ever said to me we need to change everything … We will just get on with our jobs and do the best we can. It’s business as usual for us.”
The former Tigers’ paceman, who was a member of the Tigers’ historic 2006-2007 Sheffield Shield-winning side, says Tasmanian cricket isn’t troubled by the issues around player character and behaviour highlighted in the culture review.
“We try and keep our players as grounded as we can. They naturally are. Tasmania does that. It’s one of those places where if you get a little bit ahead of yourself people bring you back to where you should be,” he says.
“We can’t control what happens at the Australian team and we continually tell that to our boys – ‘don’t worry about things you can’t control. Just control what you can look after,’ and as long as they do that I think we’ll be OK.”
Likeable, confident, calm and articulate. Griffith, 40, has the presence of an elite athlete and natural leader. He respects hard work, honesty and emotional consistency. Tertiary education and a life beyond cricket are important to him, too.
He’s someone who “lives his values”, according to Tasmanian former cricket captain George Bailey, who has known Griffith for about 20 years, and Perth Warriors bowling coach Kade Harvey, who worked alongside him in WA.
“At any sporting club, the values are generally the same,” says Bailey. “Words like hard working are pretty common and it’s easy to write them on a wall. But Adam uses them every day and refers back to them. They are values that he lives.”
Harvey agrees: “Adam is a genuine guy. What you see is what you get and that’s what Australian cricket needs right now. People who live their values and are genuine and authentic. Their values are not just words on a wall. That’s something that will hold him in good stead. He is who he is. He’s always been true to himself in terms of how he coaches, and if there are more people in Australian cricket who can provide that sort of leadership, then there won’t be a need for any more reviews.”
When Griffith donned the mantle of head coach last year, Tasmanian cricket was floundering. Neither the Tigers nor the KFC Big Bash Franchise, Hobart Hurricanes, were performing well. The Tigers had finished the 2016-2017 Sheffield Shield season in last position, and failed to make the finals of the Matador One-Day Cup in October last year. They’d finished in the bottom two of the Shield in each of then coach Dan Marsh’s three seasons in charge and they also missed the finals of the one-day competition on four consecutive occasions.
The Hobart Hurricanes were likewise struggling, having missed the finals of the previous three BBL tournaments.
Marsh was sacked and the general manager of cricket Andrew Dykes was made redundant before Griffith’s appointment as part of significant changes to the high-performance structure at Cricket Tasmania.
Griffith says his experiences in WA as bowling coach prepared him well for the challenges he faced in Tasmania.
“When I got to WA it was in a bit of turmoil around how they had played, and there were also some behavioural issues,” Griffith says. “It was pretty similar to where Tasmania was at. We didn’t have the behavioural issues, but the performance issues were here in Tasmania. I was part of the rebuild there and how they changed the culture and built a high-performance staff and high-performance list with players. We learnt a lot around how to restart or reignite a program and change things and I think then they moved into a period of really good success, where pretty much most games we played whether it was Big Bash, Shield or one-day cricket, we expected to win and were lucky enough to win some titles along the way.”
Griffith says he wasn’t ready to leave his job in WA when Cricket Tasmania chief executive Nick Cummins contacted him about the head coach role.
“I saw a pathway as a coach for me in WA … It wasn’t until Nick Cummins rang me and we had a conversation about his plans and the opportunity to start fresh, which was probably the biggest thing for me,” he says.
As head coach, Griffith was told he’d be able to shape the program as he desired. “The best thing is I wasn’t hamstrung by previous constraints … I was really conscious when I got here of not reliving the past. The past was the past and decisions were made to move on from that,” he says.
“My job was to come in and basically reset with my expectations. I was very clear on creating some direction. I wanted both the players and staff to be really clear on the values and expectations that I have day-to-day.”
He says not having a partner or children of his own have made it easier to “come and go” and take opportunities. “I have to drag myself away from cricket sometimes.”
Like many Australians, Launceston-born Griffith has fond memories of playing backyard cricket. He says his dad, an electrician, would rig up lights on the rock face in their garden so they could play through the night with their neighbours.
“We would play cricket and test matches until 11pm. It was great fun for years and years. We’d have a barbecue and get back into it.”
At 12 he joined South Launceston cricket club. “I was lucky enough to be able to train with some of the greats of Tasmanian cricket who were based in Launceston at the time, like David Boon and Ricky Ponting and [Shaun] Young,” says Griffith.
“The standard of competition in Launceston at the time was super high in club cricket. Every time you played a game of club cricket when I was 16, 17, making my debut and making my way in A grade cricket, every team you played against seemed to have someone who was playing for Tasmania or had played for Tasmania.
“It was a great learning opportunity for us about the standard of cricket you needed to play to get to the next level … That was probably the thing for me: that grounding in hard, tough cricket against grown men who showed you how to play the game.”
Since then, Griffith has shown a huge capacity for hard work and discipline. After graduating from King Meadows High School and Launceston College, he put cricket aside to complete a four-year degree in Human Movement at the University of Tasmania. He has put a Masters degree on hold for now.
He worked for 18 months as a primary and secondary physical education teacher while also playing club cricket for South Launceston, before moving south to play cricket at North Hobart.
Bailey remembers Griffith as “always very organised and very structured in the way he went about his own personal preparation” during his university and South Launceston club days.
“His place [which he shared with cricketer Shane Watson in Hobart] was always immaculate and tidy. His house was a bit of a drop-in place for younger players.”
A turning point in Griffith’s cricketing career came in 2002 when he became a contracted Tasmanian cricket player. “At the start of that season, I was lucky enough they picked me in the first one day team. I played three one day games, and then they picked me in the Shield team and then I got a contract,” Griffith says. “That was it, I was a full-time cricketer. The path I took, doing a degree, was uncommon, but it’s something that’s big now. We are big on player education and development away from cricket.”
His early experiences playing at South Launceston, and his own route into cricket have informed his views about what makes a good cricketer: “I’m a massive believer that the players that do well are the ones that have had to fight their way into a program, or who have gone away and worked and come back,” he says. “I tend to see that players who are given everything from such a young age when they get to the senior level sometimes struggle to understand the privilege they have … For me going away and working was a real blessing. It allowed me to understand the workforce and how lucky we are to do what we do.”
Griffith’s peers say he has many strengths, including his technical skill as a bowling coach, which he’s been finetuning for years — first on the field as a paceman for Tasmania and Australia (in limited overs cricket), in England for Leicestershire, and since 2011 as a bowling coach in WA and now as head coach.
“His knowledge and work as a bowling coach is really highly regarded,” says Bailey. “There’s no doubt he brings his teaching background into the way he coaches. He’s huge on attention to detail, reiterating key messages, making sure people are on the right tack, and providing clarity in terms of where he wants to be heading. He’s also well ordered and structured. He takes out any ambiguity. On top of these strengths he’s a hard worker. He’s had some good help from key people such as high performance and assistant coaches.”
Harvey says Griffith helped Cricket WA “get back on its feet”.
“He’s a really calm and measured person, and if things don’t go well he handles them well and doesn’t get too emotional,” he says. “I could never see [him losing his temper]. He’s a big man [at 198cm, or 6ft, 6in, he cuts a towering figure] and has a really strong physical presence. I think that’s a real benefit for him. When you’ve got that sort of physical presence and you’re really confident in your abilities, there’s probably no need to rant and rave.”
Griffith, who looks more at home on the field than he does in his neat and tidy office at Blundstone Arena, is clear on what’s important to him and how he measures success.
He wants Tasmanian cricketers to know exactly what’s required of them in terms of performance, behaviour and character and to be emotionally consistent regarding wins or losses.
He’s developing programs that will ensure Tasmania’s up-and-coming cricketers are playing with, and learning from the state’s best.
“We’ve changed a lot in the last 18 months,” Griffith says. “Today we had five of our Academy guys bowling to [Australian captain] Tim Paine and Matthew Wade. We are trying to really develop a culture where whether it’s George Bailey or a 15-year-old in the program, they get the same coaching, the same access to facilities, and they get the same expertise to develop them into the cricketers we want them to be.”
Hard-work and honesty are essential, he says, as is keeping young players grounded when they’re earning in excess of $100,000 a year (contracted state players earn between $65,000-$170,000 a year, and an unlimited amount for playing in the Big Bash series).
“If we work hard and we are honest with ourselves first and then with each other, everything else fits into that. We have expectations around behaviours, and expectations around how we are as people,” Griffith says. “I hope, when people walk into our organisation, they see our players working their bums off, but they’ll come over and say hello or they’ll pick up a bit of rubbish and put it in the bin. Our three behaviours that we have within our group are no mobile phones, we leave everything as we find it, and we are on time. That’s just a way of being and who we are.”
He says players shouldn’t get too caught up in good or bad days. “If when you win you’re yelling from the rooftops and if when you lose you’re jumping off that rooftop, well there’s no point in that,” he says. “You’re not going to have any consistency in performance. Whether we win, lose or draw, I try to say to our staff, when people walk into our change room, people shouldn’t know whether we have won or lost by simply walking in if they haven’t seen the scoreboard. We want to make sure we learn from the bad days as well as the good days.”
To that end, Griffith is circumspect when talking about the Tigers and Hurricanes’ successes over the past 18 months — of which there have been plenty. They’ve made the finals in all forms of the game — the Sheffield Shield, BBL and One Day Cup (three consecutive times) — since Griffith has been at the helm. While they have had a mixed start to the Sheffield Shield season, they’ve also shown some promising signs winning their first match against Queensland.
The Tigers have since lost to WA, drawn with NSW and this week endured a six-wicket loss to Victoria on home soil at Bellerive. However, the latest result wasn’t all bad news as despite a horror start the Tigers fought back with Matthew Wade’s 137 knock a highlight of the match. Unfortunately it wasn’t enough and the Vics ended up with a comfortable win.
Despite the most recent loss, George Bailey remains upbeat saying they could still take a lot of positives out of their form to date. “I think overall we have started [this season] strongly,” Bailey says. “We are in a position to really start challenging consistently for titles, but more importantly to have players start challenging for national representation. “This is vindication for the direction the program is taking.”
Griffith says Tasmanians rightly expect their cricketers to win. “Tasmania has a history of success. In the last 10-15 years we have won lots. So Tasmanians expect us to win and that’s a good expectation because we don’t walk out to the park to not win. We walk out every game to win,” he says.
“I think the difference this year to last year for me was last year we turned up hoping to win. This year we turned up expecting to win. Whether we win or not is obviously a different conversation. [But] we know now that when we’re at our best we will win.”
He says he loves to see Tasmanians don the baggy green.
“We play cricket for Tasmania and we want to win for Tasmanians, and we want to produce the best characters and best players we can to play for Australia. I get no more satisfaction than when watching our team perform well for Tasmania and win a game, and watching them celebrate, and then sitting back on the couch and watching one of our players play for Australia. I love just doing that by myself. I don’t need to be around other people. I’m just proud and happy for them that they are achieving their goals.”
The Tasmanian Tigers next meet South Australia in Round 5 of the Sheffield Shield competition at Blundstone Arena from 10.30am on November 27.
The Hobart Hurricanes play Melbourne Stars in the Big Bash League on Monday December 24 at Blundstone Arena (with Christmas carols on the ground afterwards).
For more information about upcoming Sheffield Shield and women’s and men’s Big Bash League games visit crickettas.com.au
Originally published as TasWeekend: Coach keeping his calm amid the sporting storm