Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

larger coaching staff was to take analysis to a new level by gathering statistics about all aspects of playing performance. He argued that Ian Chappell was right in saying ‘it’s about the players’ – ‘unless you have gifted players you won’t succeed’. But if cricket is right in being dismissive of coaching for elite players, ‘every other sport in the world is wrong!’ Largely the argument is spurious. It’s just about what the definition is of a coach. He’s not a technical all-rounder who can fix every problem. Maybe people saw Bob Simpson that way. But you can have lots of people doing specific tasks. In his talk to the coaching forum in Melbourne, I said things like, why don’t you have any stats in cricket, in fielding? All you know is who took the catches. But in baseball you’ve got how many errors they made. You know whether they’re right-arm, left-arm, how fast they throw it. … You need to know how many catches they took in different situations, how often they hit the wicket when they throw it, how far they can throw it, how accurate the returns are, whether they bounce. Whether a catch is a slips catch or in the outfield, a running catch or a standing catch. In relation to bowling, baseball has a hundred years of that stuff … with pitchers, how fast they throw it, what their variations are, their records against right-hand batsmen and left-hand batsmen. Cricket ought to have all of that sort of stuff but the way it developed it was never part of it. It’s starting to happen now but it’s still light years behind. In Australia, coaches and the media had long collected statistics of every aspect of each game in the AFL – for instance, the numbers of times each individual had the ball, the number of hand passes made by each team, how often teams entered the defensive 50 metre zone of their opponents and so on: ‘If you want to manage things you’ve got to measure them … but cricket never had that and still doesn’t have some of it.’ Video analysis had become essential because we want the players to see what actually happened. In my day we used to remember what happened and everybody’s version was different. Now we can say, you actually were run 70 1993-2002