Adams: Stay-home English coaches letting game down
TOO many English coaches are taking the easy option – and should go overseas to further their ambitions.
That’s the view of former Surrey coach, Chris Adams, who has spent time working with both Sri Lanka and the Netherlands in recent years. He was part of the Sri Lankan coaching set-up when they shocked England 1-0 in a two-Test series in June 2014 and also worked with the Netherlands at the T20 World Cup earlier this year.
Those experiences, he believes, have benefited him hugely – and he points to Paul Farbrace, Trevor Bayliss’s No.2 with England, as the perfect example of what can happen when English coaches take a chance.
“Paul Farbrace was sat in a very comfortable, safe seat at Kent with their academy,” says Adams.
“He sat in that role for a long time and could still conceivably still be there, in that job, smiling happily with everyone knowing that he’s in that job and he’s not under threat.
“Actually, he put his head above the parapet, went off to Sri Lanka with Bayliss, experienced something completely different, and then came back to the head coach’s role at Kent. That didn’t work out but he went back to Sri Lanka and proved himself again.
“Now he has found his niche with England – he’s a brilliant No.2. He took a risk but it has really paid off.”
Farbrace’s career path isn’t one that has been replicated by too many other English coaches, with most preferring the home comforts of the county game to working in either international cricket or in domestic competitions overseas.
That, though, is the polar opposite to many foreign coaches who have come over to the county game for relatively short periods before taking what they’ve learnt back home. Jason Gillespie at Yorkshire and Jimmy Adams at Farbrace’s old county, Kent, are two recent prime examples.
“Overseas coaches are far, far better at projects and Jason Gillespie is a great example,” says Adams. “He came over to Yorkshire, he widened his knowledge base, got first hand coaching experience at a big county but recognised there was a start point and an end point.
“He has now taken that knowledge and experience and gone back home. I can only assume, but I think his great ambition is to coach Australia and he has put himself on that pathway. I would say that 90 per cent of our English coaches coaching our cricketers would not have a realistic ambition of coaching England one day.
“I actually think that the kind of approach taken by Jason would work for our English coaches as well.”
Adams has experienced the more brutal side of the county game, having been unceremoniously ditched by Surrey in June 2013.The role of the county coach has, arguably, become more tenuous in recent seasons, with more and more counties ready to make changes when things aren’t going their way. That said, Adams believes the homely nature of the domestic game still lends itself to a safety first approach.
“For English cricket, the majority of the counties in England have coaches that are so comfortable in their own scenario and situation that they create little islands for themselves and they live on these islands for 15, 20 years,” he says.
“I’m a big believer in shelf life, not necessarily as a coach but as a coach in one job. I think it’s good to move, it’s good to be fluid and experience things.
“One of the great frustrations about county cricket – and there are a lot of good things about county cricket, don’t get me wrong, I’m not knocking it – is that our coaching can be really stale because nobody moves.
“You can be at one county for 20 years – you can’t tell me that that’s a healthy situation and that you’re keeping yourself fresh and invigorated and updating your knowledge and skill base.
“All that happens is you get highly protective of your world and your situation and your decision making is based more on securing yourself and your position rather than putting yourself out there and trying to improve.
“The rest of the world is so much better at that. What we’ve got is quite a lot of supply in terms of jobs.
“A lot of county cricket is made up of what we’ve just talked about. County promote from within, there’s an element of ‘I like what I know and I know what I like’.”
There are some following in Farbrace’s footsteps. Simon Willis, for example, left Canterbury earlier this year to become Sri Lanka’s high performance manager. Toby Radford, meanwhile, has returned to the West Indies as their batting coach.
Others, though, appear more reluctant to take the plunge. To English cricket’s detriment.