Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

out or the ball was going to hit the stumps. Or you were on the back foot, not the front foot and you were right in line … . In his book, The Coach , Charlesworth remarks: Sport has always been my passion. It is not an activity fit only for philistines, as high-brow commentators often suggest. I have always seen it as an intellectual exercise as much as a physical one. Indeed it is because it is one of the few activities that embrace both requirements that I have found it so challenging. Team sports have a third element to them: ‘complex integrated activities, they require co-ordinated, co-operative effort in order to succeed.’ 28 Interviewed in 2009, he agreed that this description was less true of cricket than faster moving sports like hockey and the various football codes: ‘Yes, it is less true. But the defensive part of the game – fielding – requires co-ordination: for example throwing and backing up, although when I’m batting it’s just me versus the bowler and all about reflexes.’ And he added that his philosophy of leadership described in the book was especially relevant to cricket. As coach of the Hockeyroos he had quickly discarded the idea of a single captain. Up to 1996 he had used a designated ‘leadership group’ of six players. In the latter part of the decade he had dispensed with this arrangement, making all players in the squad equally responsible for leadership. Former team-mate Bob Paulsen remarked in 2009 that captaincy was fine for Ric, when he was doing it, but afterwards he decided it was unnecessary. In the face of such comments and of press criticism and even derision that ‘one of Australia’s greatest former team captains’ had ‘suddenly sacked his own team’s captains – all six of them’, Ric responded that fortunately the athletes were more realistic and accepting. … Already they understood that we were best served not by one leader and a bunch of followers, but by a vibrant group of players who were encouraged to show initiative. Already they were aware that this move would thwart the leadership ambitions of a few whose motives may not have been perfect. In an interview with this writer in 2002 he had explained: 1993-2002 71 28 Ibid ., pp 4-5.