Sacked Australia coach escapes Ashes 'headache' while successor puts his foot in it with 'cheat' attack on Stuart Broad
Last night, just like every other night this summer, Mickey Arthur sat up in front of his TV talking to himself. His family tell him not to bother. They say he should "let it go". But, as he admitted in an interview on ABC radio, Arthur cannot do that. He has watched every ball of the series. Despite the late nights, he says he wakes up feeling "fresh, revitalised", happy because if he "was waking up in London, 3-0 down in an Ashes series, I would be waking up with a severe headache".
Which is pretty much how Darren Lehmann must have felt this morning, when he realised he had whipped up a little storm after being suckered into letting slip a few loose comments on radio Triple M. The same station once lured Matthew Hayden into describing Harbhajan Singh as a "little, obnoxious weed" and Andrew Symonds into calling Brendon McCullum "a lump of shit". There is an art to getting sportsmen to feel comfortable enough to talk as they would when they are among friends in the bar. It requires the kind of "rat-like cunning" that Nicholas Tomalin reckoned was one of the three essential qualities for any good journalist. The talk show hosts at Triple M seem to have long since mastered it.
Lehmann's argument, such as it was, is easily dismantled. Broad, he said, was guilty of "blatant cheating" because he had not walked, way back in the first Test, when he had "hit it to first slip". But he did not hit it to first slip. He edged it to the wicketkeeper and the ball rebounded.
"I hope the Australian public give it to him right from the word go for the whole [Australian] summer," Lehmann added.
"And I hope he cries and goes home. I don't advocate walking, but when you hit it to first slip it's pretty hard. Certainly our players haven't forgotten. They're calling him everything under the sun as they go past."
Presumably the 11 batsmen Broad dismissed at Chester-le-Street made sure to bring it up with him as they tucked their bats under their arms and trudged back to the pavilion. Shane Watson may have mentioned it here too, when he was doubled over after Broad hit him on the head with a wicked bouncer.
So, if anything, the remarks betrayed nothing much other than Lehmann's naivety and his tendency to say stupid things. Which is a habit he has had for a while. In December he was fined Aus$3,000 (£1,725) for implying Marlon Samuels was a chucker. And in March he was fined another Aus$2,000 for shouting at the umpires when they ended play early because of bad light in the Sheffield Shield final. He said then he had been "fined for telling the truth". Way back before that, of course, he was banned, and put through counselling, when he used a racial slur after being dismissed in a one-day match against Sri Lanka.
All of which could not be more at odds with the way Arthur carries himself. During his interview with ABC, he explained that he saw himself as a "life mentor" as much as he did a cricket coach. He used the word "journey" 10 times in 25 minutes, once explaining that "it was a journey we were on. We had to live the journey. I was living that journey with the players." It seems he took a wrong turn somewhere along the way, one that led him back to his house in Perth. The split had come, he said, during the recent Test tour of India.
"When you sit down with a player and you look them in the eye and you talk about their journey," Arthur explained. "You can see if he is biting into every word you say, I guess Shane lost a little bit of respect for me in India. My whole role was to take Shane on a journey before India." At which point the interviewer, Geoff Hutchinson, asked rather drily: "Are there some guys who go, 'Look, I'm just here to play bloody cricket'?" That, said Arthur, was "spot-on". The approach, he said, had been "too esoteric" for some. "Which was disappointing."
Watson, it seems, was one of those. Which means that, even if he could hear what Arthur was muttering at his TV in the the night, he would not have listened. Arthur reckoned that because he has "a trained eye" and "knows the psyche of all the players" he can "watch something developing and I know what is going to happen". So when he watches Watson, he says, he sits there chanting "Don't do that again. Don't do that again. They're trying to set you up for an lbw." You don't need a trained eye, or even a working one, to know that. Or what comes next. "Keep hitting straight! Keep hitting straight!" Arthur says to himself. Then "Aww! Not across the line! Damn!"
Until today, that is, when Watson finally played the kind of Test innings that Arthur, and so many others, believed he was capable of. This was a wonderful century. His ferocious straight drives scattered the non-striker, umpire and bowler like so many skittles. Chris Woakes contemplated cutting one off with his boot but snapped it back, like a man stepping into scalding water but realising it could have cost him his foot. Watson reached his fifty off 61 balls. At that exact point Chris Rogers had taken the same number to make 12. The opener's innings was the better reflection of the conditions in the morning, before Woakes came on. And this time, unlike almost every other time, Watson went on and on and on.
For all the trouble it gets him into, it looks as if Lehmann's particular brandof straight-talking bullshit has got through in a way that Arthur's mumbo-jumbo never did. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.
Last night, just like every other night this summer, Mickey Arthur sat up in front of his TV talking to himself. His family tell him not to bother. They say he should "let it go". But, as he admitted in an interview on ABC radio, Arthur cannot do that. He has watched every ball of the series. Despite the late nights, he says he wakes up feeling "fresh, revitalised", happy because if he "was waking up in London, 3-0 down in an Ashes series, I would be waking up with a severe headache".
Which is pretty much how Darren Lehmann must have felt this morning, when he realised he had whipped up a little storm after being suckered into letting slip a few loose comments on radio Triple M. The same station once lured Matthew Hayden into describing Harbhajan Singh as a "little, obnoxious weed" and Andrew Symonds into calling Brendon McCullum "a lump of shit". There is an art to getting sportsmen to feel comfortable enough to talk as they would when they are among friends in the bar. It requires the kind of "rat-like cunning" that Nicholas Tomalin reckoned was one of the three essential qualities for any good journalist. The talk show hosts at Triple M seem to have long since mastered it.
Lehmann's argument, such as it was, is easily dismantled. Broad, he said, was guilty of "blatant cheating" because he had not walked, way back in the first Test, when he had "hit it to first slip". But he did not hit it to first slip. He edged it to the wicketkeeper and the ball rebounded.
"I hope the Australian public give it to him right from the word go for the whole [Australian] summer," Lehmann added.
"And I hope he cries and goes home. I don't advocate walking, but when you hit it to first slip it's pretty hard. Certainly our players haven't forgotten. They're calling him everything under the sun as they go past."
Presumably the 11 batsmen Broad dismissed at Chester-le-Street made sure to bring it up with him as they tucked their bats under their arms and trudged back to the pavilion. Shane Watson may have mentioned it here too, when he was doubled over after Broad hit him on the head with a wicked bouncer.
So, if anything, the remarks betrayed nothing much other than Lehmann's naivety and his tendency to say stupid things. Which is a habit he has had for a while. In December he was fined Aus$3,000 (£1,725) for implying Marlon Samuels was a chucker. And in March he was fined another Aus$2,000 for shouting at the umpires when they ended play early because of bad light in the Sheffield Shield final. He said then he had been "fined for telling the truth". Way back before that, of course, he was banned, and put through counselling, when he used a racial slur after being dismissed in a one-day match against Sri Lanka.
All of which could not be more at odds with the way Arthur carries himself. During his interview with ABC, he explained that he saw himself as a "life mentor" as much as he did a cricket coach. He used the word "journey" 10 times in 25 minutes, once explaining that "it was a journey we were on. We had to live the journey. I was living that journey with the players." It seems he took a wrong turn somewhere along the way, one that led him back to his house in Perth. The split had come, he said, during the recent Test tour of India.
"When you sit down with a player and you look them in the eye and you talk about their journey," Arthur explained. "You can see if he is biting into every word you say, I guess Shane lost a little bit of respect for me in India. My whole role was to take Shane on a journey before India." At which point the interviewer, Geoff Hutchinson, asked rather drily: "Are there some guys who go, 'Look, I'm just here to play bloody cricket'?" That, said Arthur, was "spot-on". The approach, he said, had been "too esoteric" for some. "Which was disappointing."
Watson, it seems, was one of those. Which means that, even if he could hear what Arthur was muttering at his TV in the the night, he would not have listened. Arthur reckoned that because he has "a trained eye" and "knows the psyche of all the players" he can "watch something developing and I know what is going to happen". So when he watches Watson, he says, he sits there chanting "Don't do that again. Don't do that again. They're trying to set you up for an lbw." You don't need a trained eye, or even a working one, to know that. Or what comes next. "Keep hitting straight! Keep hitting straight!" Arthur says to himself. Then "Aww! Not across the line! Damn!"
Until today, that is, when Watson finally played the kind of Test innings that Arthur, and so many others, believed he was capable of. This was a wonderful century. His ferocious straight drives scattered the non-striker, umpire and bowler like so many skittles. Chris Woakes contemplated cutting one off with his boot but snapped it back, like a man stepping into scalding water but realising it could have cost him his foot. Watson reached his fifty off 61 balls. At that exact point Chris Rogers had taken the same number to make 12. The opener's innings was the better reflection of the conditions in the morning, before Woakes came on. And this time, unlike almost every other time, Watson went on and on and on.
For all the trouble it gets him into, it looks as if Lehmann's particular brandof straight-talking bullshit has got through in a way that Arthur's mumbo-jumbo never did. Reported by guardian.co.uk 3 days ago.