Ball watcher now bird watching
One of England’s finest coaches, Duncan Fletcher tells Scyld Berry why he is happy with life away from cricket.
If you go for a walk or a bike ride at 5am every morning, few places on earth are more enticing than Hermanus Bay – and you might have expected that England’s most ingenious cricket coach would live there.
Duncan Fletcher has had both knees replaced recently, yet he gets on his bike or walks round the bay in Hermanus on South Africa’s south coast. No finer place to see southern right whales diving and leaping a couple of hundred yards off shore in season; and the bay is lined with beaches of dazzling white to match the spume of the wind-whipped waves.
‘‘He was the best,’’ Michael Vaughan says about the coach who took England from bottom of the rankings in 1999 to the summit when they won the greatest Ashes – or any other – series in 2005. ‘‘He was ahead of his time in cricket coaching, he saw the game technically better than anyone else I worked with. Would still, in my opinion, have a huge amount to offer, particularly with younger players we now have.’’
As in the rest of life, the merits of those who do not play politics and blow their own trumpet are insufficiently recognised.
Fletcher was perceived as stern beneath his sunhat and shades, whereas he still has, at 71, the most boyish grin when he laughs and wrinkles his nose. Had he revealed that the captain, Andrew Flintoff, was getting paralytically drunk on the 2006-07 Ashes tour when England lost 5-0, he could have saved his neck, but did he heck: he pulled them together so the team at least won the subsequent one-day series.
Fletcher is an autodidact. ‘‘I never went on a course,’’ he said, ‘‘I always teach myself.’’ He applied his ingenuity to cricket initially when he captained Zimbabwe in the 1983 World Cup and the rank outsiders beat Australia, then had India – eventual winners – 78-7 in another qualifier. If the match had been staged at a more illustrious international venue than Tunbridge Wells, with its short boundary on one side, Kapil Dev might not have saved India with 175.
Outside cricket, Fletcher’s ingenuity was manifested in the Treasury data department in Harare when his job was to renumber Zimbabwe’s car number plates. ‘‘To help the police identify hit-and-run drivers, I decided on six digits followed by a letter, excluding I and O. If the driver who had been hit only remembered the first two or three digits and the letter, and the colour of the car, the