Lives in Cricket No 12 - Ric Charlesworth

Junior World Cup and then groom a side for the 2010 World Cup, Asian and Commonwealth Games.’ 36 Failure to qualify for Beijing, Charlesworth told the ABC’s Attard, ‘was very stressful and I was offered the job … [of] leading the programme’. He agreed, but said ‘we need to do a number of things.’ We had a tournament coming up in Holland where I wanted some of the other players to go. I wanted to take a video analyst. … The women’s team was going to be playing there at the same time: I organised all of these things, but in the end some bureaucrat had to tick it and it didn’t get ticked. And so the capacity to actually act and get things done was daunting and impossible. Professional difficulties were compounded by personal ones. He was living in Chandigarh, ‘which is perhaps one of the most livable cities in India and at one level my interactions with the local people and the people I was meeting were lovely and enjoyable’. But in other ways life was ‘incredibly frustrating’, he told the ABC’s Attard. Some of those personal frustrations related to his family, he told this writer. It took a long time to arrange for them to join him. When they did so, his wife Carmen thrived and developed ‘her own networks’, but ‘it was hard on the kids’. Elite English-speaking schools in India can cost as much as $A25,000 [a year]. Although the sum was much less in Chandigarh, so was the quality of education. His children hated their school ‘where their English was much better than the teachers’ and where many of the pupils [though not his own children] attended with armed escorts as the security situation deteriorated’. By the end of June 2008 he had had enough of an intolerable situation. In his resignation letter, summarised in India’s national newspaper, The Hindu , on 12 July, he said he was left with no other choice than to resign from the post of Technical Advisor to Indian hockey. … Even though he was offered the post of National coach informally, there seemed to be little enthusiasm for putting in place the necessary support such a position needed. 2002-2009 85 36 Ibid .