CRICKET: Paul Martin
IT sure ain’t gonna be no easy ride in this sheriff’s posse.
Big Bob Woolmer is known in the cricket world as something of a radical, an intellectual, a man of ideas, new ideas.
For one thing, he will be requiring from the South African cricket team the same sort of dedication to fine detail that the world’s top golfers and tennis players put in.
“Nick Faldo will take two hours just practising getting out of bunkers,” he points out. “Guys like Borg or Stich spend just as long with their coach on how to perfect their back-hand volleys.
“Yet cricketers go into a net and we casually dish out all sorts of bowling to them. They just play. I’d rather they worked on each skill, so, for example, they get 200 half-volleys to hit, then 200 short ones, and so on. They should practice specific shots like the sweep, or lofting the off- spinner for four over extra-cover.” He would use video-cameras and bowling machines, and “all sorts of modern technology: my right-arm throws quite well,” he adds.
The remarkable improvements he’s already brought about as Warwickshire and Boland coach stem, he says, from each player working assiduously on improving his own technical skills. Only as he sees himself making progress will a player gain that vital extra confidence in his own ability.
“You fail less, your confidence goes higher, that makes you mentally stronger,” expounds Woolmer. “Everyone has self-doubt. My job is to stop it. It’s all about keeping ahead of the game, of turning supposed weaknesses into real strengths.”
A key to consistency, most applicable in South Africa’s current subsidence, is “to keep people focused. To get them to concentrate on making their good innings, of 70, not a century. Their 120s into 150s. Not to let people rest on their laurels.”
He wants his cricketers to spend more time in the nets even during Test matches. Rather than sitting watching fellow-batsmen, he would expect the middle-order to leave after about half an hour and get bowled to by the tail-enders and the reserves. He’ll also expect any recognised batsman who gets out cheaply to calm down, shower if necessary, pick up his weapon and get down to them nets, man. It will help overcome brooding, and start restoring confidence.
It might sound from all this work-em-hard stuff that Woolmer may have a disciplinarian, even authoritarian streak. If so he keeps it well in check. “I have been coaching for years by consensus,” he explains. “I believe it’s the only way.” It’s not just a buzz-word. When he took over ailing Warwickshire four seasons back, “we could be brilliant one day and absolute rubbish the next. You can’t just tell them on their bad days: you’re rubbish! What you’ve got to do is work on their becoming consistent.”
Whatever he did at Warwickshire, it certainly worked: this year, admittedly with the useful addition of a certain Brian Lara’s nine centuries including a quintuple hundred, Warwickshire won three of the four English trophies, even though none of its English players was considered good enough to play in the series against New Zealand and South Africa.
“You’re dealing with grown men who have their own views on the game, and you can only change their ideas by consent, and gradually. You have to inclucate their ideas over a period of time,” is how Woolmer explains his approach.
“I’m convinced it’ll take less (italicise) time to change the players’ ideas at international level: partly because they know if they don’t change and they’re not achieving, their place is in jeopardy.”
Before big matches at team brainstroming sessions he would develop tactics against each perceived threat. “Even when a bowler’s having a purple patch, like Devon Malcolm at The Oval, each batsmen must get into a mind-frame, and have a game-plan, to see them off. They must realise that no-one can bowl like that for more than nine overs.”
To diagnose South African players’ faults before he gets to grips with the team is not Woolmer’s style: he uses that fashionable phrase, “a learning curve”, to describe the forthcoming tour. “I hope they expect a lot from me. I promise it’ll be no holiday — as they play, I’ll be throwing in the nets.”
Between big encounters he will hold analytical sessions with any struggling player, but only with the captain and vice-captain also present, and only if the player < I>wants help.
For all, Woolmer will encourage expansiveness and innovation. For example, when Peter Kirsten hooked a rampant Devon Malcolm and was caught on the fence during The Oval Test, he would have received praise not admonition.
“I like to have each player develop a game plan in response to specific circumstances, and the confidence to employ it. Test cricket is cat and mouse; you have to develop strategies for taking on the bowling and getting people out,” Woolmer said.
To tell Hansie Cronje and Andrew Hudson they are good enough to score centuries again is not much use: to give them tangible evidence that they are recovering some lost skills, like (in Cronje’s case) feet movement, will restore the confidence: that’s the Woolmer approach.
His immediate task is to work out strategies for countering Wasim and Waqar’s reverse swing, and the unknown new paceman, or pace-boy. “I’ve got a few ideas,” is all he will disclose on that front, in case the Weekly Mail & Guardian reaches Lahore.
It’s the Test series against New Zealand, home and away, that provide Woolmer with his major chance to make an impact. Tests are the ultimate for him, and he regrets only having played 19 as an England all- rounder — his career having been interrupted by the rebel Gooch tour to South Africa and a three- year ban, as well as the previous Packer cricket rebellion.
Despite his politcally incorrect (in retrospect) decision to tour here with the England rebels, and his later contracts with Natal and Western Province in the Union system, rather than with the anti- apartheid SACB, Woolmer has a liberal track record of considerable weight.
“Yes I was on the ‘wrong’ side, but I am not a political animal, and an Englishman by himself couldn’t change anything,” Woolmer begins, somewhat defensively. “I was against the system but I had to make a living, while doing something useful. I insisted when I came to the Western Province that I would only play if I could also work with underprivileged children.”
And so he did — with a passion that proved his genuine commitment. He transformed the Avondale Club from two struggling senior teams to a thriving complex of 11 junior teams and five senior XI’s. “There was a terrific moral conscience then during a terrible situation, and it was easier to fund- raise than it is today,” he says.
Nor was he averse to his best players, including Shukri Conrad and Lenny Thomas, “defecting” to the SACB leagues to run “brilliant” coaching on similar lines to Woolmer’s. He enthusiastically backed up the work in the black township of Langa by John Passmore. All this, he points out, before Dr Bacher’s cricket clinics programme was underway.
Another minor sensitivity is his being seen as an Englishman in charge of a South African team. He stresses that he spent his first 11 years in India, and after a 10-year sojourn in England began visiting South Africa. He actually emigrated from England to South Africa in 1985, he says, but for lack of a job had to return to a coaching contract with Warwickshire. “I was distressed at the time, but without that Warwickshire experience I wouldn’t have got this new job,” he notes.
Indeed he wouldn’t, though his transformation of Boland alone may have brought him into contention. “Our goal now is to win a major Test series,” he maintains. “That is the arena, though we don’t treat one day cricket lightly.
“It’s amazing how much the isolation has told, and there’s a lot of weakness at Currie Cup level, which affects our national team. We need to bring players in at a younger age, and while we are building we should make sure youth is prevalent — like the Australians do.”
There is one cricketing minefield he is careful not to tread in: who should be captain. Yet he does set out an interesting list of his own preferred criteria: “He should be knowledgeable, experienced, and able to hold his place in the side. He needs to be flexible, too, not too dogmatic. And by experienced I don’t necessarily mean old. For example Atherton was young, at 25, yet pretty experienced.”
Whoever it may be in future, Woolmer will let him (italicise) make the match decisions, like when to declare. And you can bet your bottom pound or rand that he will be subtly adding to the team’s skills and morale — but only, of course, through consensus.