Neil Manthorp : Cricket
South Africa’s domination of the World Series one-day competition in Australia has been almost embarrassing. Actually, it has been extremely embarrassing to Australia who have changed their squad and tried to adapt to the modern trends of instant cricket after half a decade of laurel- resting; they are still being stuffed.
Even last season South Africa’s record in the one-day game was unprecedented — for creativity, planning and winning percentage. This season the record stands at nine wins out of 10. Overall, since Bob Woolmer became coach three seasons ago (this is his fourth), South Africa have a winning record of 70%. And that was after starting with a 0-6 slam-dunking in Pakistan in 1994.
They have already qualified for the finals of this competition with two matches remaining, leaving the antipodean rivals to indulge in a slightly ungainly skirmish for the right to meet them again in the best-of-three encounter in Melbourne (Friday 23rd) and Sydney (Sunday 25th and Tuesday 27th, if necessary).
Sporting coaches are men with their necks permanently on beheading blocks. That can make them more-than-usually insecure and understandably wary of anyone who may, or may not, have the ability to wield an axe. Often they can misunderstand a situation, but more often than not they are aware when the climate changes around them.
Choppy waters or an ill-wind, coaches know when there is trouble about. They have to. It is their job that can change hands with an occasionally fickle administrative, or public, whim.
And the official wind has definitely changed around Woolmer in the last couple of weeks. United Cricket Board managing director Ali Bacher has told two or three journalists that Woolmer’s job is safe until the World Cup in England in 1999 and yet, strangely, his contract has still not been renewed. No reason has been given for this unusually long delay.
Sporting contracts usually work like this: when one year remains, an extension is offered — with improved terms — if the employer is happy. If the employee is unhappy, that is his opportunity to negotiate new terms. If the employer is unhappy, then he does not offer an extension to the contract and he allows the employee 12 months, or thereabouts, to make a plan for the future.
Woolmer’s contract expires on April 1. His record is far from unreasonable. Actually, it is brilliant. “If I went about my job purely to get results, if that is all I was concerned about, then I’d be failing South African cricket,” is what Woolmer says of winning statistics.
“I see my job as trying to give young players the wherewithal and means to be able to improve their own games, to be able to walk into the national side far better prepared than the current generation had the chance to be. I want to help them to think tactics, approaches and game-plans.
“Of course you can over-complicate the game for a young, uninhibited player, but only if you try and make him take everything he learns in at once. You can’t have enough knowledge about this game. I want our guys to learn as much as they can from greats like Barry (Richards) and Graeme (Pollock) — that’s why I invited them into our dressing room.”
Woolmer is desperately keen to carry on as coach until the World Cup. Hansie Cronje (who is very, very quick to point out that he [Cronje] is no certainty either, by the way) is equally desperate to go to England for that competiton with Woolmer as coach, if he is still captain. Most things do point to their symbiosis being retained, but only just.
Certainly after the World Cup Woolmer will step aside (or “be stepped” aside). He may be offered a consultancy position with the UCB, but that is speculation.
There is no such thing as a cricketing secret in the English county game and it is from there that news of Woolmer’s successor-to-be comes. From Wales, actually. Glamorgan, whom Duncan Fletcher helped guide to the County Championship last summer, was offered an unprecedented five-year contract by the Welsh county lucrative enough to set him up for life. He turned it down.
Perhaps Western Province made him a multi- million rand deal to stay in Cape Town? Perhaps not … Fletcher, like 99% of first-class coaches, is motivated massively by the prospect of the international stage and it is unlikely, in the extreme, that he would have turned down all those pounds sterling had he not had a “semi-official” nudge and wink from someone official.
Woolmer, meanwhile, with wife Jill, two teenage sons and all the responsibilities associated with successful suburbia, must finish this tour — including the final test in Adelaide — knowing that he may not have a job two days after he returns to Cape Town.
On February 6 Bacher will convene a meeting of the UCB executive to decide Woolmer’s fate. As Bacher says, “It would be crazy to replace Bob now.” Woolmer, naive before in his own estimation, is taking nothing for granted.
“I’ve been in and around these situations before. I would like to think I have made an important contribution to South African cricket at international level. However the UCB must do whatever they think is right for South African cricket, not for Bob Woolmer. If they decide they’re better off without me, then I’m history.
“There is a time limit to every coaching position, nothing lasts forever … it’s not right. Maybe the World Cup would be the perfect time to leave. But what happens if South Africa wins every Test and every one- dayer between now and then?”
At the risk of repetition, there are no secrets in the English game. That is why Woolmer’s offer from Surrey was known to be so lucrative (75,000 pounds a year was rumoured, but Woolmer strongly denies that). What he is unable to deny, however, is that English ECB officials are making no attempt to disguise the keenness with which they are watching the Woolmer/UCB situation develop. If the man is asked to switch allegiance from South Africa to England in the three weeks between this tour and the four-month, five-Test tour to England in May, then, well, a man has to work.