Ashes: Ian Chappell says Ben Stokes would be foolish to accept England captaincy
Ben Stokes has all the attributes to be England captain, but Aussie legend Ian Chappell reckons he’d be foolish to take the job.
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Ian Chappell says he has the perfect way to fix the respective coaching conundrums Australia and England face: get rid of them all together.
England is almost certain to part ways with Chris Silverwood after their dismal Ashes showing, while Justin Langer is no certainty to keep his job, despite Australia’s winning ways.
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Every cricketing nation has a head coach, but legendary former Australian captain Chappell says it’s time to do away with them at the top level and entrust the captain with control of their nation’s fortunes.
“Everyone’s talking now ‘oh, get rid of Silverwood and get this bloke, get that bloke’ — it’s not going to make a lot of difference,” Chappell said.
“I don’t know why everyone jumps up and down about coaching at the highest level.
“The simple fact of cricket is if you’ve got a captain who you think is good and you give him a bunch of competitors who want to play for the captain, they’ll win a hell of a lot more games than they’ll lose.
“The whole game has got a system that doesn’t work.
“It’s down to the guys who get the wickets and make the runs and take the catches.
“If you’re trying to have a game any other way than the captain running the show, then it’s a mistake.”
With Silverwood and a number of assistants in quarantine due to Covid-19, the Poms will test Chappell’s theory in Sydney this week.
Chappell spoke to News Corp after he joined forces with Bare Cremation to create an outrageous “Ashes” ad to encourage people to talk about their afterlife arrangements and use humour and memories at funerals to celebrate, rather than mourn.
Chappell has a “fatalistic view” of death, brought about by the untimely death of his father and discussions with his mother before she passed away.
Tough conversations and decisions is why he believes woeful England are staring down the barrel of a 5-0 Ashes whitewash because they have a long history of being frightened to make big calls.
“Australia has made a move on some very good captains,” he said.
“Mark Taylor got moved on from the ODI captaincy, Steve Waugh got the same, Ricky Ponting was probably told it’s time to move on. Australian cricket has been better at making tough decisions.
“England won’t do that. They had Alastair Cook as captain for a long time. Now Alastair wasn’t a very good captain. Joe Root’s not a very good captain.”
He believes Ben Stokes should be England’s next leader, but doubts the brilliant all rounder would want a job that has become a poison chalice.
“Ben Stokes has got all the attributes you’d want of a captain, but you’d have to say that Ben Stokes is probably smart enough to say ‘well, I don’t really want the job’,” he said.
“If I was offered the job, I’d say I’ll take the job, but under my conditions and just be very clear on what you want to do. And if they don’t want to meet those conditions, then say ‘go find someone else’.
Vaughan’s big play: If Aussies don’t want Langer, grab him
—Sam Landsberger
Embattled England has been urged to target Justin Langer to rebuild its broken Test side if the Australian coach become a free agent and counterpart Chris Silverwood gets sacked after the failed Ashes campaign.
No man has ever walked from one Ashes camp into enemy territory to coach the opposition, but former England captain Michael Vaughan told News Corp that Langer was the perfect candidate to steel his country with a harder edge after its humiliating 0-3 start to the series.
“If England do make the change and Australia don’t want Justin Langer …. phwoah,” Fox Cricket’s Vaughan said on Thursday.
“Whatever he’s doing is working. Whether people like him or not he’s getting results, and that’s all it’s about in sports. At the highest level it’s about can you get a group of people to produce to get results.
“That means sometimes you don’t always have to have coaches that are nice to people.
“If the Aussies don’t want him, I’ll have him. I think he’s got passion, drive, he’s got honesty.
“I think the modern players potentially don’t like being told things they don’t want to hear and I think he’s a bit old-school.”
Langer has an intricate knowledge of English cricket, having captained Somerset during a four-year stint at the end of his first-class career. He owns the County’s top score — 342 against Surrey in 2006.
Langer — fresh from delivering the T20 World Cup and Ashes glory — wants to continue coaching Australia in all three formats, but Cricket Australia has not guaranteed him a contract beyond midway through 2022.
Player feedback has not been kind to Langer, although he has recently mellowed out and already achieved this summer’s two missions.
Vaughan said England’s “horrendous fielding” pointed to poor coaching.
“We’ve not hit the stumps and the no-balls are an absolute madness at this level,” he said.
“You go and watch practice and massive no-balls are being bowled in practice. These are the things that coaches should absolutely be able to stamp out.”
Vaughan suspected opener Rory Burns would be recalled for Haseeb Hameeb at the SCG but said selection was “irrelevant” because the system was broken.
“The only person I would bring back in is Ollie Pope, because I think he’s a young player with a career, and maybe put (Jonny) Bairstow behind the sticks.
“But I don’t care. They’re shuffling the chairs, but it’s still the same table.”
Vaughan said all countries should appoint separate red and white-ball coaches, but if Langer wanted to take on all three formats he would still be the right man for England.
“I’m led to believe he wants to do all formats. I just don’t think it’s possible,” Vaughan said.
“With his history of County Cricket in the UK, absolutely I’d be looking at Justin Langer if he became available and England had a vacancy.
“English cricket has got to be honest with itself. For 35 years we’ve only won six Test matches in Australia.
“This tour is by far the worst of them all because no one’s done anything.
“There’s been no hundreds, no five-wicket, no real individuals to celebrate.
“Usually when England are getting hammered down here there’s always an individual or two who are scoring hundreds or getting wickets — that’s not been the case.
“This is the worst of them all. There has been too much of a focus on white-ball cricket in the UK. We’ve all got to be honest — we lost 4-0 last time, we last 5-0 the previous time, we lost 5-0 in 2006-7, we lost 4-1 in 2002-03.
“Our system has not been right for a long while to prepare players to be successful and for teams to be successful to beat Australia in Australian conditions.
“They have to look at the system and the pathway and the development and the pitches and the ball — they have to look at every aspect of the game to finally I hope realise that we do need change.
“Like we did with the white-ball team in 2015 we changed the pitches, we changed the ball, we changed the mentality, we dedicated more time to the white-ball game, we let players go and play in these leagues around the world.
“That’s what we have to do now with the Test team, we need a thorough examination of exactly what’s required to produce a world-class Test match performance.
“It’ll probably take four or five years to get to that. England has never ever in my time, from the 1980s to the 90s to the 21st century, been a dominating force in Test cricket.
“We’ve had very good teams, but never had a dominant side like Australia or the West Indies or Pakistan briefly.”
Why Langer’s predicament shows world has changed for elite coaches
—Robert Craddock
If, as seems likely, Australia coach Justin Langer quits while he is on top after the Ashes, it will send a poignant message to the coaching world which stretches far beyond cricket.
“The only coaches who go the long term distance in cricket, and most sports these days, will be ones who gently tilt the boat as it is going down stream,’’ a former Test cricket coach told me last year.
“The ones who try and turn the boat around and take on the current just won’t be able to do it. The world has changed. Players, and the world in general, are more sensitive now. And they have more power.’’
I didn’t believe him then. I do now.
The world has changed and no-one has to apologise for that. Not Langer, for his old-fashioned intensity which rubbed up some players the wrong way, or the players for preferring a lighter touch from their leaders as embodied by the smiling, deep thinking captain Pat Cummins.
But the one certainty is that it’s the coaches who have to change, not the players, and Langer, to his credit, has tried to.
Some wise old heads like AFL legend Leigh Matthews saw changes coming.
“One thing I have noticed these days is that if you were an outstanding player, those Alpha male qualities that made them special almost work against them as a coach,’’ said Matthews.
He was hinting that all the hard-nosed aggression and self-reliant brilliance a champion player might display with a football in his hand might work against him when he picks up the clipboard. He suddenly has to become Mr Magnanimous to survive.
Matthews did not specify who he was talking about, but Collingwood’s Nathan Buckley might well agree with the sentiment.
Langer’s first national coach, Bob Simpson, was, according to some judges, Australia’s best ever mentor yet he was famously an under-your-skin kind of guy and always off-side with some players.
You only had to wait until Simpson was out of earshot to hear a player bag him, but, significantly, in Fox Sports Cricket Legends series, player after player from that era have dropped lines like “must admit I really struggled with him at the time, but looking back he really knew what he was doing.’’
Maybe Langer, too, will be appreciated more in retrospect for trying to be the standard-lifter that Simpson was a few decades before him.
Some coaches like the Melbourne Storm’s Craig Bellamy, can retain their bristling intensity but rugby league is just a 90 minute game and when Bellamy is at his most intense, in the coach’s box, the players are not with him.
The challenge for Langer was that he was raised in a rough and tumble, bare-knuckled world as a player and had to adjust to a vastly more sensitive one as a coach. Few coaches in any sport truly adjust to this challenge.
Normally, in modern sport, statistics trump sentiment.
By the third week of this month, Langer is likely to have the T20 World Cup and the Ashes in his pocket for the summer and the defeat by England in a T20 pool match could be his only loss for the summer.
Had he been an Englishman that might well warrant a nod from the Queen, but it appears the scars of a recent player revolt are so deep and it would be surprising if Langer stays on beyond his four-year term which ends in June.
Successful yet adrift: Langer seems a dead man walking
-Peter Lalor
Extraordinarily, Justin Langer appears for all the world to be a dead man walking.
It’s not so much he has knives in his back as nobody appears to have his back.
It is difficult to see how he can remain as Australian coach when his tenure ends in the middle of the year and even more difficult to understand how this situation could be.
A coach approaching the end of his contract when his team has secured the Ashes 3-0 and his team’s first T20 World Cup would usually be fighting off pleas from the administration and team to sign on the dotted line as soon as possible.
The coach would be able to name their price. Particularly a coach who is being eyed with envy by the opposition camp who are on the hunt for somebody to replace Chris Silverwood.
A lot of this doesn’t sit well.
There was, without a word of exaggeration, a player revolt mid year. Leaders from the Test and white ball team had a high-level meeting with chief executive Nick Hockley and then chair Earl Eddings in August after Cricket Australia publicly endorsed the coach.
Hockley had earlier released a statement which congratulated Langer for having “restored faith in the national team” and claimed the side had been successful in the previous 18 months despite challenges.
That was before they won the T20 World Cup, and Ashes but after players had signalled reservations about Langer’s methods.
Key players were blindsided and disappointed by CA’s endorsement of Langer and let them know.
They had told management on a number of occasions — including in an official review — that there were issues with the coach’s methods and were frustrated they were not being listened to.
The statement under former chair Earl Eddings felt like a deliberate slap down.
Players felt management, the board and Cricket Australia’s executive were not listening to them.
They were told to front the coach themselves and a number of extremely frank conversations were held when they did.
Players had resolved after the white ball tour of Bangladesh and the Caribbean in June, which came after frank feedback in the review run by Tim Ford, that Langer would never change, but the face-to-face meetings had instant results.
Langer was stunned but stung into action. Finally surrounded by a coaching staff of his choice and signalling that he had listened, he stepped back at the T20 World Cup.
This was no longer the wide-eyed, directionless group he had inherited, they were comfortable in their own skins and knew what needed to be done.
You heard a lot about “player driven” success after the historic T20 World Cup win and since the Ashes when questions have been asked there’s been … crickets … about Langer’s future.
Langer signalled it was his desire to continue coaching all three formats recently.
One of his closest allies at work, high performance coach Ben Oliver, was asked about it on New Year’s Eve.
“We’ve made a commitment prior to the start of this summer that we’d be really focused on the Twenty20 World Cup and this Ashes campaign,” he said.
“Once this series is finished we’ll come back as a collective and work through that.”
They’ve won both those tournaments, but Oliver said they will stick to the process and they’ll consult players.
Hockley has been saying the same thing.
When football clubs do that only ever means one thing.
There is a board meeting in early February but the matter seems certain to come to a head before that body gets around to addressing the issue.
A day before Oliver spoke selector George Bailey could only offer that he thought the coach’s role would be split and from all reports that appears a distinct possibility.
After the side secured the series win in Melbourne skipper Pat Cummins was asked if he backed Langer.
“I don’t think today is the day to speculate on that,” he said. We’ll all sit down together after this series or whenever his tenure is up. His contract is up for renewal in a few months and we’ll deal with it then.”
This could all have been handled better.
Langer has done a remarkable job as coach. He has helped resurrect the team’s reputation after South Africa. If it is not brand he is measured by but results, well, World Cup and Ashes’ trophies are on the shelf.
The team? It’s humming, they showed that at the World Cup and they’re showing it now. Cummins with the support of his under study Steve Smith have filled the leadership role left when Tim Paine stood down, the new players have all got runs on the board, the old ones are in the form of their life.
Still, coaching three teams for four years is an exhausting task. Langer drove himself to distraction in the early days.
He seems to have the hang of it these days which might be a perfect time to walk away, maybe take the money somewhere else, but whatever happens he deserves to be able to do it on his own terms.
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