The rise and fall of Andy Flower almost inevitable

IT is an accepted rule of political life that all careers, no matter what heights they might have touched, end in failure.

IT is an accepted rule of political life that all careers, no matter what heights they might have touched, end in failure.

The eternal image of Margaret Thatcher weeping in the back of her limo makes that truth painfully clear. The same rule works in the coaching of sports teams, to quite an alarming extent. Which may be some slight consolation to Andy Flower.

Flower is the most successful coach of the England cricket team since the England cricket team started having coaches. Under his command, England were the No? 1 Test nation and Twenty20 world champions. They beat Australia in three successive series, and in Australia beat them three times by an innings. They also won from one down in India. Under Flower, England bloomed.

I remember talking to him in India before that turnaround victory in Mumbai in 2012, as fine an England performance as I have seen. I was impressed by a self-contained man who thought things through and had faith in his power to do so. He had a deep self-confidence, the more impressive because it was so understated. It was based on such humdrum things as hard work and application and sureness of touch.

And I saw no reason then why he shouldn't, as Thatcher herself aimed to do, go on and on and on. He knew what he was about. He knew the job inside and out.

Roy Keane, in his autobiography, used the word "bluffer" as a routine term of abuse. Flower was the precise opposite of a bluffer - no acting, just a calm, clear vision and an easy, quiet certainty.

Now he steps down as England team director after one of the worst tours in cricket history. In sporting terms, it was a disaster from first to last. Everything went wrong and when it came to putting it right, everybody has been clueless. That's a process that starts at the top.

It reflects the patterns of sporting history. Duncan Fletcher brought about the biggest turnaround of all. In partnership with Nasser Hussain, his captain, he turned a culture of defeatism into a series of victories; with Michael Vaughan he won back the Ashes in the glorious summer of 2005.

Two years later he was gone, after England were whitewashed in Australia.

The same process happens in other sports. Sir Alf Ramsey won the World Cup for England in - you may have heard - 1966.

There is no higher achievement in football coaching. Every part of the story centres on Ramsey: his icy brilliance, his loyalty, his ability to stand up to the fools in the FA on behalf of his players. Admired, respected, loved and triumphant, that was Ramsey. His England career ended when England failed to qualify for the 1974 World Cup finals after that final shattering inability to beat Poland on the night when Jan Tomaszewski, the goalkeeper, played such a blinder.

Sir Clive Woodward won the rugby World Cup for England in 2003 and was rightly seen as a coach of innovative brilliance. To be around that team - and I was around it a lot - was to feel a sense of shared vision, of shared privilege of being in the same crack outfit. It was a coaching performance to rival anything in sport, yet the same man went on to lead the British and Irish Lions to a tour of disaster.

It could be argued that Sir Alex Ferguson is an exception, and there is no denying the truly exceptional nature of his domestic achievements. But it can also be argued that his failure was in his inability to secure continuity.

What goes wrong? Why is the process so inevitable? It's impossible to put a finger on it. As time passes, a person changes, and that can be the problem.

Or he can fail to change, and that can be another kind of problem. He can lose key personnel; he can insist on keeping players whose best is past. He can be too keen for new ideas, he can be too stuck with the tried and tested. He can meet opponents with new and better methods. He can just get older.

Either way, a great coach will have his successes and then he will fail. We must thank him for the successes we shared, accept the inevitability of failure and wish him well as he moves on.

The Times