Book Review: If Better is Possible: John Buchanan

I did not pick up John Buchanan’s book because I expected it to be a cricketing classic along the lines of The Art of Captaincy or Beyond a Boundary. I picked it up because I wanted to peek into the dressing room of the Australian team; I picked it up because I wanted some inside stories and trivia on some of those legends whom Buchanan strung together into arguably the greatest team ever to step on to the cricket ground; I picked it up because I thought Buchanan would throw light on some of the whispers that came out about his relationship with Shane Warne, Ricky Ponting and some of the other Aussie luminaries.

Talk about over-expectation. If Better is Possible is not even a book on cricket. Yes, you read that right: It is not even a book on cricket. IPL notwithstanding, it is common knowledge that Buchanan intends to focus on a non-cricketing career as a business consultant. If Better is Possible is his calling card for that profession. The cover page descriptor, The winning strategies from the coach of Australia’s most successful cricket team, is as revealing of the shaky language in the book as it is of the book’s subtle attempt at a crossover from cricket to business.

The book is a loose collection of Buchanan’s reflections on different aspects of coaching, and his attempts at tying those to business management. The constant jump from cricket to business is unsubtle, irritating, interfering and forced for the most part.

Buchanan’s career as Australia’s coach (1999 to 2007) has been fairly uninterrupted by failure. The two big blips they’ve had in this streak were the 2001 series in India and the 2005 Ashes. Here’s Buchanan’s take on these two.

First the 2001 series in India, specifically the Kolkata test.

The Aussies take a first innings lead of 274 and Steve Waugh decides to enforce the follow-on, because Australia, as is their wont, want to “be aggressive, dominate and bury the opposition.” Every one knows what happened, VVS Laxman and Rahul Dravid, and then Harbhajan Singh. So what does St. John have to say?

There were some factors outside our control which conspired against us, such as India changing their batting order which allowed VVS Laxman to open after being 50 odd not out in the first innings, some dubious umpiring decisions, a rampant and highly charged Eden Gardens stadium, incessant heat, and ultimately two players, Laxman and Rahul Dravid, who played possibly the best innings of their careers.

Sounds a bit like the Englishmen after yet another defeat, don’t you think? Well, to be fair, the Englishmen put one past Buchanan’s Aussies, didn’t they, in the 2005 Ashes? How does Buchanan explain that?

Jamie Siddons had just taken over as assistant coach from Tim Nielsen for the Ashes. And to facilitate Siddons to get to understand the players better, good old John decided on a strategy: to pull back from the players so I could spend more time being strategic about our preparation, our opposition and about finding tasks and experiences to expand the horizons of the players. One part of his strategy succeeded: Siddons got to know the players well. But it turned out to be a case of winning a battle but losing a war. As the great man confesses, “the situation demanded the opposite approach.” There is something about some sight being 20-20, isn’t there? Of course, there were other reasons as well, as always.

We began the series not fully prepared for a range of reasons – some in our control, some not.

When you lose, there are always factors outside your control, aren’t there?

To be entirely honest, Buchanan does throw light on one character who plays but a cameo in the book. Before you start salivating, the character in question is not an Australian, but an Englishman. Buchanan had just taken over as coach of Middlesex in 1998. Mark Ramprakash had also been made captain just that season, and John and Mark meet for the first time. And Mark says: “You don’t change the rules of the club. The players don’t change the rules of the club. If there are to be changes, I am the only one to make them!”

The Buchanan staples are all there – the emphasis on processes over results, the obsession with “taking the game to the next level”, the importance of rituals, the elevation of Justin Langer to the same level as Shane Warne and Glenn McGrath and such like. The staples of a bad writer are in full evidence as well – a zigzag disjointed narrative, repetition of incidents, incomplete examples, careless language, the cardinal sin of telling-not-showing…

That the most interesting statement in the entire book is not John’s own, but a quote from Glenn McGrath (on the eve of the final of the 2007 World Cup, Pigeon says, “the final is why we are here”) tells its own story. If Better is Possible is a book begging to not be written.

A “tale” of two coaches

I am not much of a magazine reader, except for Cricinfo Magazine. And if my newsagent is to be believed, it is probably going out of circulation. That would be a real shame, but that is not the reason for this post.

On a lark, I picked up the latest copy of Outlook, a general interest magazine in India. And it carried an opinion piece that made me wonder whether I was missing out anything at all by not reading magazines.

The piece is titled Only One Bully Here, and it compares Greg Chappell, the former Indian coach who led India nowhere in the Cricket World Cup, and Kabir Khan, who coached India’s women hockey team to victory in the World Cup. Before you begin to wonder when India won the Women’s Hockey World Cup, Kabir Khan is the hero of the Bollywood film title Chak De India. And while the author admits at the beginning that the comparisons “seem almost ludicrous,” he goes ahead and does a serious job, analyzing “how and why the two men achieved such different results, how both tried similar lines of attack, but one ended up with a triumphant smile and the other left his job in absolute disgrace.”

Well, there is a simple reason the results are so different – one is real life and the other is reel life. The rest of the reasoning is purely a function of that. Kabir Khan can afford to tell his prima donna Bindia, “this team can have only one bully and that’s me,” and it is sure to have the right impact because the film’s director would have scripted Bindia’s response appropriately. But if Chappell had tried the same with Saurav Ganguly, who would have played director?

I kept checking back and forth to figure out whether the article was written tongue-in-cheek, but it does not seem to be. One possible opportunity could be to get the film’s director to coach the Indian cricket coach (if and when there is one). Except that the person will have to coach the Indian players also to get them to respond appropriately to the coach. And the opposition so they fall for the coach’s plans and let India win.

I don’t think I’ll pick up another magazine in a hurry.

The coach that crossed the road

Trevor Bayliss, who used to coach Stuart Clark at New South Wales, is now the coach of Sri Lanka. And as Sri Lanka and Australia square up in the coming months, Clark had this to say of his recent interchanges with Bayliss.

He’s told me that he knows my game inside out and that the Lankans will smash me around the park. I’ve told him that they’ve no chance if he’s basing that on his useless coaching tips.

Hmmm… now that’s a problem with coaches being shopped across the world. The man who spent three years shaping you goes off to coach your opposition, and now he can use all that knowledge against you. Of course we have county colleagues who are national opponents (and vice versa), but a coach is different – he works on tightening a player’s (and team’s) technique and addressing weak spots, so how would a player feel if his coach for a long time were to move over to the opposition? Will he become over-conscious of his weaknesses? Will his old insecurities resurface? In view of this possibility, can countries start getting coaches to sign non-compete clauses for defined time intervals, as tends to happen in corporate scenarios in some circumstances?

On a speculative note, if John Buchanan had been shopped midway through his contract with Australia, would the team that contracted him had better chances of beating Australia? I suppose we’ll never know.

Look ma, no coach

Take Monty Panesar’s performance of yesterday away and there isn’t much to talk about in cricket. Virender Sehwag makes another quick start and throws his wicket away in that most-watched tournament in the history of the game, the Afro-Asian Cup. And Saurav Ganguly is busy proving that one-dayers can be played the test-match way (as I write this post, he has made 13 runs of 31 balls; in contrast, Sehwag made 52 of 38, Sanath Jayasuriya made 11 of 16 and Mahender Singh Dhoni has made 13 of 13). Ho-hum.

So a pick from a different sport.

The seventh-seeded Ana Ivanovic from Serbia faces top seed Justin Henin from Belgium in the French Open women’s tennis finals today. For Ivanovic, it has been a great run, what with a win over Svetlana Kuznetsova in the quarter-finals and an upset victory over favorite and second seed Maria Sharapova in the semis. Of course, beating Henin in the final will be quite a challenge. More so, because Ivanovic will get no advice from her coach, Sven Groenefeld.

Now why would that be? Well, the reasons are purely commercial. Ivanovic and Henin are both contracted to Adidas. So is Groenefeld. And part of Groenefeld’s deal is that he cannot coach one of the company’s players against another. I’ve heard of non-compete clauses in employment scenarios, but this certainly is taking it to a new level.

You would think companies sign up players and coaches because they want them to perform well. I wonder how sports bodies let these companies get away with these clauses. The next thing you know, they may bar their contracted players from playing against each other. And considering how commercial interests have ruled cricket, is there a similar contractual bind that exists in cricket? Such stipulations may just make it easy for India to select their national coach.

What England need in ODIs

Graham Thorpe suggests that Michael Vaughan retire from one-day internationals and England make Kevin Pietersen their captain for the limited overs version of the game.

Enough has been said about Vaughan’s performance (or lack of it) in the 2007 World Cup. His performance in one-day internationals overall hasn’t been glorious either. An average of a mere 27.15 over an 86-game career without a single century to his name speaks for itself. So may be he should do a Steve Harmison vis-à-vis the one-day game.

But should Kevin Pietersen be the captain? Will it be too early? (Memories of a certain Ian Botham come to mind.) Will the responsibilities of captaincy curb Pietersen’s free spirit? If Andrew Flintoff were to come back to full fitness, would he be a better candidate for captaincy? However, inasmuch as Pietersen (apart from Flintoff, when he is not on the surgery table) is the only automatic selection into the England one-day squad, may be his name should at least be discussed.

But captaincy is not the core of England’s concerns when it comes to the one-day game. Their bigger problem is that they just don’t seem to have grasped the gestalt of the game, notwithstanding the plethora of one-day games that are played as part of the county season. The so-called one-day specialists are too one-dimensional (Who was that opener who hit one swept six off the fast bowlers per game and nothing much else?) and journeyman-like; the test specialists are too rigid in adapting to the limited overs game (Vaughan himself and Ian Bell come to mind; Graham Thorpe in the past was not dissimilar either, with due respect). But its not about the players; the England management seems to be lost in terms of one-day strategies, team selections, and the like.

May be what England really need is a coach specifically for the one-day game. A coach who understands the one-day game. A coach who will build a one-day team for a few seasons and not tournament by tournament. A coach who will fill the team with the optimal mix of solid players and floaters. A coach who will get the team to take the one-day game seriously. And a coach who is not an Englishman.

It’s a challenge that can daunt a John Buchanan. And tempt him too. Imagine he takes up the gauntlet. And gets England to lift the big cup in 2011 (with a finals victory over Australia)? Won’t he go down the annals of cricketing history as the greatest coach ever?

The Bradman of coaches?

Is John Buchanan the best coach cricket has ever had? Apart from the seemingly endless sequence of wins that Australia have enjoyed under his coaching, the ways Australia have dominated (and continue to dominate) the game suggests an answer in the affirmative. Are there any composite numbers that can rank cricket coaches? For a game that thrives so much on statistics, it’s a surprise that we don’t have win averages, margin ratios and such like discussed on a consistent basis for coaches.

Back to Buchanan. Some may have questioned his coaching methods; some may have found his penchant for misplacing notes on the opposition a bit funny; but no one can question the fact that he has been the coach of the most successful cricket team of the past decade, and perhaps in all of cricket history until now. (Quiz question: who was the coach / manager of the 1948 Australian Invincibles? Or did Sir Don do that role as well?)

Rohit Brijnath of the Sportstar catches up with the Buchanan in this interview.

Buchanan’s stringent training routines and his focus on a corporate style of people management may have got more ink space in the media through his tenure as coach, but this interview brings out the little factors that characterize Buchanan’s success. Like the insistence on carrying their own bowling machine to West Indies during the World Cup this year, even though the West Indies Cricket Board had promised that there would be bowling machines at all venues, just because “it is one of the things we can then control.”

“Playing the percentages” is a term that gets used a lot in cricket. Buchanan does this too.

“Batting wise I looked at our scoring shot percentages, which is the number of balls we score from in an innings and roughly we average 150 to 180 balls an innings, so that means we're not scoring from 120 to 150 balls. And I said to the players I think it's realistic we can actually improve that by 5 to 10 per cent.

“The flip side to that is our bowling, we're in the vicinity of 50 to 55 per cent dot balls in an innings", and so again they tried to increase that by 5 to 10 per cent. In fielding it was the same. Buchanan looked at the opportunities created, the catches, throws at stumps, dives, and the numbers told him the team was successful about one in four times. So they tried to get it close to one in three.”

Buchanan almost seems to treat runs and numbers as entries in a Profit & Loss statement and work on them accordingly – increasing something here, cutting a little bit there, and thus improving the overall numbers successfully. (May be Peter Moores should just tell a certain Stephen Harmison to ensure that he gets the batsman to play at at least 3 deliveries in an over. Now that would be a start, wouldn’t it?)

Simply put, success (in cricket at least) is about doing the little things right, seems to be Buchanan’s mantra. Contrast this with coaches who talk of processes, long-term plans, “building a team for the future” and the like.