Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

private schooling for the kids, house, car. So it was very attractive.’ He had gone to England in August 2007, two months before his New Zealand contract expired. He met the outgoing high- performance director, Peter Moores, who was moving to what became a short-lived period as coach [after irreconcilable differences with new captain Kevin Petersen saw both lose their positions]. ‘I had a look, met them at Lord’s and they offered me a contract.’ But about the same time he was approached by the International Field Hockey Federation [FIH] to go to India to help restore the faded glories of that once dominant hockey nation. As a member of the Executive Board of the FIH, David Collier perhaps had as big a dilemma as Charlesworth. ‘The India thing,’ said Ric, ‘was nowhere near as lucrative, but a bit more exciting and it was back in hockey, a great challenge.’ For years he had been saying to the Indians, ‘look, if you don’t get your act together, you’re going to make a mess of it.’ Asked to comment on some internet sources that suggest he also had offers to coach Indian cricket, Ric responded that there were approaches all the time from people who run academies. There are academies all over the place. Yes, there were offers of work in some of these academies. But it’s difficult to know what might be involved. Some of them are bogus. There were no offers comparable to the one from England. Even though it was backed by the International Field Hockey Federation [FIH] and the International Olympic Committee [IOC], it had been ‘a very difficult decision’ to choose the Indian offer instead of the English one. But in the back of his mind was the thought that if he went to England, working for England cricket, he would probably never get back into his first love, hockey. He made the decision knowing that ‘if things didn’t work out I could always come back here,’ to Perth. While things were failing to work out on a spectacular scale in hockey, Ric also gained further insights into the ugly, new world of Indian cricket. And, in ways he hadn’t foreseen, he was able to return to Perth financially damaged but back into hockey at the highest possible level. * * * * * 82 2002-2009