Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

endorsed the guy who got it.’ Reflecting on this in 2009, early in his new job as coach of the Australian men’s hockey team, the Kookaburras, Charlesworth implicitly made it clear he wouldn’t have been happy to take the job without being given at least some of the resources he felt the cricket coach lacked. He thought Buchanan was the right person at the right time and continued to see him quite often. I count him as a friend and I think he’s a really capable fellow. But one thing I said to him was I don’t think one person can do this job properly. This is 200 days a year watching cricket – sorry, as much as I might love cricket, I’d go nuts! And he has five children! In his subsequent long tenure Buchanan would be often criticised by traditionalists for using new-fangled coaching methods, including video analysis of his own and opposing players’ techniques. The flamboyant Shane Warne and Ian Chappell, who thought the only necessary coach was a vehicle to take a team to the ground, were publicly contemptuous of Buchanan as an introvert obsessed with academic analysis of the game. Yet Ric would have gone much further than Buchanan was able to do. Like numerous cricket devotees he was enthusiastic about statistics. But, unlike most, he was not gripped by an antiquarian fascination with past achievement: statistics were a tool for improving future performance. The reason he thought cricket should have a much 1993-2002 69 Coaches commiserate. Ric, centre, with John Buchanan (cricket, left) and Don Talbot (swimming, right) in the Sydney Olympic Stadium in 2005.