Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

is pretty weird because what I’m saying is everybody has to act like a captain in cricket. The captain in the change rooms can’t make decisions for those batting. When the bowler has the ball in his hands it’s not the captain that has the main influence. Every individual should be thinking like a captain. Of course the captain has the power to decide who bowls. But in Ric’s experience with the Western Australian team ‘that was never an individual’s decision: it was almost always made after consultation’. The same was true of field placings. ‘It was always a continual dialogue and [the slower nature of] cricket allowed you to have that dialogue.’ One can only speculate how different Australian cricket might have been if Ric had responded to the overtures from Malcolm Speed in 1999. Even if he was right in believing that he was likely to be offered the job, it seems likely he would want it to be a radical departure from current coaching practice. His bewilderment that John Buchanan could contemplate watching cricket 200 days a year was no idle quip. He doesn’t deny the truth of the story told with relish by former team-mate Bob Paulsen: during a stint in the ABC commentary box at the WACA ground a year after his retirement he said: ‘I don’t know how you guys can do this. Watching cricket all day is so boring!’ prompting the reply from commentator Dennis Cometti: ‘What do you think it was like when you were batting?’ It’s hard to believe the Australian Cricket Board – soon to be Cricket Australia – would have provided the resources to fund a bevy of statistics collectors supporting the coach, or found the will to formalise a qualified role for the Australian captain. And, given the amount of money that became available to players with contracts from the governing body, it’s highly unlikely that even a ‘stubborn, opinionated’ Charlesworth would have been able to prevail in the key area of selection that he considered had failed to move older players on quickly enough to make way for youth. In the event there was no way Ric could commit to cricket in 1999, when his hockey team was climbing towards the last peak of its seven and a half year rise to unparallelled dominance at the 2000 Sydney Olympics. The coaching methodology he had developed had to be put aside, awaiting possible later cricket opportunities – as long as those would fit into the priority he always gave to hockey. 1993-2002 73