Justin Langer excelling in the loneliest job of all

Once the team is in the field, Justin Langer is as much a spectator as anyone else.

Australian coach Justin Langer speaks to his players during a net session at Old Trafford. Picture: Getty Images

Like the majority of successful top sports personalities, Justin Langer has a website, a gateway for those seeking his services as a speaker on subjects such as “leadership”, “teamwork” and “success and the Australian cricket team”.

Not that Australia’s coach is doing much of this at the moment — you could say that he is in a content-building phase. At the moment, in fact, the visitor to JustinLanger.com.au is currently advised that “Justin Langer: Encouraging Excellence” is inactive, being “currently under maintenance”.

As well it might be, and Langer too. At the weekend, he confessed that defeat at Headingley had taken its toll, that he had felt “physically sick” afterwards, and “wasn’t sure whether to cry my eyes out or smash my hotel room”.

Having been relatively positive in the game’s immediate aftermath, Langer owned up to a certain abiding grief: “You do take it personally because I know how much work’s going into it. That was the biggest part of losing last week, that we felt we were so close and we let it slip.”

Brains trust … Australian coach Justin Langer is flanked by captain Tim Paine (left) and chairman of selectors Trevor Hohns at Old Trafford yesterday. Picture: Getty Images

This is the cricket coach’s gruelling lot: that once the team is in the field, he is as much a spectator as anyone else. He has the best view in the house. He knows the plans, the objectives, the individual and collective purposes. Yet over these he has, for the time being, no influence: out there the responsibility falls back on the players. “Encouraging Excellence” may sound like boilerplate, but contains a degree of truth: excellence can never be mandated; it can only be striven for within the limits of the human material at one’s disposal, and remains susceptible to the sway of chance and luck.

Paradoxically, it is the coach who is closest to the exit when the going gets tough. By the end of next month, six of the nine rivals in the World Test Championship will have changed coaches this year — almost as farcical as the Championship itself. (At Headingley, Australia went within a fumble of winning one of the greatest Tests of modern times and received zero points — “farcical” is the only possible non-swear word).

Just entering the second year of a four-year contract, Langer faces no similar jeopardy. But this contrast, I suspect, he feels acutely. It is only ten years this month since Langer played his final game of first-class cricket. Of all his national coaching peers, he has the most distinguished playing record, and formed part of the most successful playing period. The challenge of letting go the cricketer one once was is so great that some never make it.

Langer had no sooner retired than he coveted the role of Australian coach. He had to be content, at first, with the role of batting coach, and probably wasn’t really. Later he became a successful domestic coach in the state, Western Australia, where his playing reputation and local connections were great attributes.

Yet nothing can prepare one for the role of national coach, uniquely visible, ever evolving. Langer’s task parallels what we’re increasingly told is nearly impossible, confined among cricketers to a minuscule elite — that is, to excel in all three formats. With basically two weeks left of his four-year tenure, it’s debatable in what state Trevor Bayliss has left English cricket, given the robbing of Test match Peter to pay short-form Paul.

Langer will brook no compromise on the pursuit of broadbased success, and with good reason: it was a turnaround in Australia’s one-day fortunes earlier this year that helped rebuild its Test confidence.

But just as the new squad sensibility is designed to guard against physical fatigue, so there is a mental version. The smashing up of hotel rooms, even the contemplation thereof, is best left to Guns ‘n Roses.

“Brooding intensity” … Justin Langer. Picture: Getty Images

How has Langer gone this summer? Well, I’d argue. There was a period of mutual acclimatisation in the Australian set-up. Langer’s brooding intensity was a significant departure from Darren Lehmann’s laissez-faire ways; it did not suit his assistant David Saker.

With Western Australia, Langer was noted for paint-peeling post-match debriefs; a team still smarting from Sandpapergate needed perhaps a little less abrasion.

All the same, the Australians exceeded their expectations during the World Cup, then at Edgbaston. And through the greater pressure faced since they have in some respects come through impressively.

They encountered batting conditions on day three at Lord’s and day one at Headingley in which previous Australian teams have disintegrated, yet showed impressive resilience. Langer can take a good deal of credit for the reincorporation of David Warner and Steve Smith, the growing stature of Pat Cummins, the advance of Marnus Labuschagne.

The visitors’ bowling has been efficient, certainly better than four years ago, and their outcricket sound. Even on the last day at Leeds when some hard chances went begging, Warner took a superb catch and Travis Head executed a brilliant run out.

The most intriguing roles in the Australian set-up this summer have been played by Ricky Ponting, who was with the team for the World Cup, and Steve Waugh, who accompanied them for the first two Tests, and in an unexpected bonus has now returned for the last two.

Normally, the presence of a past master is about providing an exemplar for the young. I suspect that Ponting and Waugh have played just as significant a role in complementing and balancing Langer, helping his confidence in the job, providing him with a cobber.

Head coach is a lonely role. He has no immediate peer, no natural confidante. He is expected to be the source of all answers, yet accountable for events, as previously noted, in which he is only indirectly involved.

Langer is luckier than some. He is justly popular in his own generation, many of whom are now part of the commentariat, which has tended to tamp down criticism. But Ponting and Waugh are likelier to tell Langer what he needs to hear than what he wants, which is their value. From “maintenance”, things often return enhanced. Whatever happens this summer, chances are that Australia’s coach will be better for it.