Recently in the eye of what he termed “a storm in an espresso cup,” Justin Langer, head coach of the LSG, seemed in awe of cricket’s evolution from a one-coach-one-physio endeavour in his early playing days to the heaving 90-man entourages of the IPL today.
Sitting back in his chair at a plush city hotel and gesticulating with his eyes and hands while speaking, Langer’s train of thought veered from past to present and onward to the future.
The one-time foot soldier of the formidable Australian team of the 1990s is one of the sharpest cricketing brains around, and he was excitedly pouring his thoughts out on the game. The TOI Sports team just happened to be present. Read on…
This is your first coaching stint in the IPL. How difficult is it to be a coach these days, especially in such high-profile franchises?
When you’re a player, you have control. You take absolute responsibility for your performance. The only thing that’s out of your control is selection, or what the media writes or what people think of you. You focus only on watching the ball. If you make runs, the only currency of value is runs. If you make runs, you get selected. If you get selected, you get a contract.
I went straight from playing to coaching – as an assistant coach, which is the best coach job in the world. You work about two hours a day, everyone’s your best friend, and you’ve got no accountability. Then you become head coach, oh man, then you work about 16 hours a day. No one likes you. And you’ve got 100% accountability!
I took a break from coaching for two and a half years for the first time in my life (after the Australia stint). I had do my writing, my speaking, I did my board roles. I had complete control. It’s like being a batsman, again, there’s freedom in that.
And then I came back into coaching. And you realise again that you’ve got your hands tied. In football, the coach has control over the match. Whereas in cricket, the captain does everything on the field, right? So, you manage your people, you make them feel happy, you make them ready to play, you help them with peak performance, you help the superstar and the kid who’s just coming in.
You’ve to mentor them and coach them differently. But you must understand they are all different people – some introverts, some extroverts. You have got to learn how to manage. So as head coach, you are purely a man manager. You have to manage them well so that they perform on the field. And that’s tough.
Coaching staff in teams have ballooned since your playing days…
When I started playing with the Australian cricket team, Bob Simpson was the coach. When I started playing professional cricket, we used to train on a Wednesday afternoon, we all had full-time jobs. We had one coach who was part time, and I think we had a physio, and you only got paid if you made the first 11.
Now there are coaches everywhere. Things have changed. It’s a 12-month business. We have three different formats of the game which guys play all year round. Now they play in different franchises, they play international cricket. Yes, times have changed. But there’s still a role for an assignment, right? We call it professionalism. We try to look after people well.
Let’s face it. There wasn’t an IPL when Ian Chappell was around. There were no franchises. There were no broadcast rights. If we expect the players to be high-performing individuals, then they expect high-performing services and that comes in the form of coaches and physiotherapists and doctors and people who throw balls all day.
I worked full time in a bank, or in a stock broking firm until I was 28 years old. Then Middlesex rang me and asked if I wanted to go and play. I played three years at Middlesex and then I became a full-time cricketer.
In franchise cricket, the money rolls in fast. Superstars are made very easily. Do you think ego then becomes a big issue for players?
In the Australian team I played in, we had Matthew Hayden, Shane Warne, Glen McGrath, Ricky Ponting. They were superstar players because of their performance, not because of how much money they made. One of the challenges we have today is that we still judge players on the performance, not on how much money they get paid.
There’s so much money in the game. But you still have to be a high performer. MS Dhoni is MS Dhoni not because he’s made a lot of money.
My point is that Dhoni, Rohit Sharma, Virat Kohli and KL Rahul are incredibly wealthy, but they are superstars because of the way they perform. Dhoni won a World Cup and was one of the greatest finishers of the game. People will never forget those performances.
In India, with 1.4 billion cricket-loving people, you could pick five teams which can beat most countries. There’s so much talent. I’m blown away. So my point is, I also see how much pressure these young players are under because I they all want to be a Dhoni, they all want to be a Virat Kohli or Rahul or Rohit. But they’ve got a long journey to get to that point. The only way they can survive here is by performing and performing and performing.
There is a perception players’ heads get turned by so much money floating around, with so many brands chasing you…
When I went to the IPL mini-auction, I saw several players going unsold. There are lot more heartbreaks than success. For the ones who make it, there is a lot of money in the game. That’s just the joys of the money from broadcast rights. But the ones who make it must be very good cricketers. They’re the cream rising to the top.
Yeah, they might be getting the brands, and they might be doing the rounds of social media. But if they don’t perform, they get destroyed. They either get dropped or get destroyed by social media. So, the pressure, in some way, balances it all out.
When I played my third Test, the great Allan Border gave me some amazing advice. I still give it to the players today. He was wearing expensive, branded shoes and I asked him if he could help me get a shoe sponsorship. He told me, you make all the runs in the world, you become the best batsman and you will get all the shoes, or the sunglasses or the fame or the money you could ever imagine. Focus on that. Nothing’s changed.
Shane Warne turned up for the first session with Bob Simpson – peroxide hair, earring, a mobile phone in one hand and a packet of cigarettes in the other. These guys were like, who’s this young upstart? But he was real. And he performed so well he was great. All these kids now say Shane loved fast cars, loved women, loved smoking cigarettes. But he was brilliant. He made a lot of mistakes off the field, but he was a great performer. We miss him.
If we look at the greatest cricket teams of the past, there’s always an inherently strong sense of team bonding. How do you create that in a franchise environment, with so many different players from all over?
It’s a challenge when you’re here only for 10 weeks. This is why I really admire Chennai. They have a solid foundation, the same Stephen Fleming’s (head coach) been there since Day One, I think. I respect that. They’ve won five times. Let’s face it, Lucknow Super Giants is a very young franchise. It’s still a work in progress.
I imagine what we’re all striving for is when players come to their franchise, it’s like coming home.
Tom Moody told me IPL is like the Olympics, you’ve never seen anything like it.
From my experience of four years with the Australian team, I can say building an international team it is exhausting. It is tough. If you don’t perform, the whole country lets you know about it. And that is exhausting, right?
The hardest thing about being head coach in Australia is selection. If you a player from one state, the other state complains. International cricket is not like franchise cricket.
We only play six months of the year, but you have the full pre-season. You build up the family, you build up the culture and you build up all these inputs over 12 months. It is very tiring.
How does Australia invariably rise to the occasion in World Cups?
When you play cricket for Australia, the expectation is you’re going to win because we win. That might sound very simplistic, but this is the Aussie mindset.
In IPL, there is so much pressure to win. Then there’s pressure just to be in the team. When we started winning, then suddenly there was this load of expectations. You could feel the pressure building.
In contrast, we Australians just go with the flow, stay relaxed. It’s about having fun. And they know they’ve got so much talent on the park. They just go about their business. They are used to winning. They are used to doing it their way. It is like, we don’t take it too seriously, even though we take it very seriously. It’s almost like a paradox. That’s the secret.
When you walk into the Australian dressing room, it’s like being in a nightclub 24/7, I’m not joking. It was so much fun. We had so much respect for each other, and it was so much fun. And that’s the difference.
If the pressure builds, you’ll never perform at your best. And I know that as a player. The harder you try, the worse it gets. And in big games, if things tighten up, you’re dead. But if you just stay relaxed…. my heroes were the West Indies, the early West Indies team I watched while growing up. Like Viv Richards, they just seemed so chilled out all the time. They knew they were talented.
How do you handle the fear of failure?
I’m sure individuals think about the fear of failure. I lived with it until I was 28 years old. And it is paralysing, the fear of failure. It can drive you, but living in a world of fear of failure is a dangerous world.
We are human beings. I remember seeing Steve Waugh suffer that. He was a run machine but had got a duck. He was going through a small run of failures. I remember he got out just before stumps in Johannesburg and got in the bus after that — he had his collar up, had his cap down and wore sunglasses. I went and sat with him. I said, ‘How’re you feeling, captain?’ He goes, ‘Pretty rubbish.’ So, even the greats have doubts and insecurities. That’s being human, right?
How important is it to take care of the mental health of players who are always such pressure?
There is more acceptance now. I respected Glenn Maxwell for coming out a couple of years ago and say he had mental-health issues. I see guys like Will Pucovski. He is a supreme talent, but he’s got issues. He suffered from concussion. Yeah, so the concussion is one thing, but that is also linked with some mental-health issues.
We are human, we all are on a spectrum of mental health. And it’s just about dealing with that. It is about man management, knowing that everyone has to look after their mental health every single day of their lives. That’s one thing about being a coach, you got to keep observing all the time. And you can see it in their body language, you can see it in the way they perform, you can see about in their actions, you can see it in all these things.
As the head coach, you got to be like a father, like a school teacher, be a psychologist, be a mentor. All these things rolled up in one. In IPL, the team entourage comprises 90 people. You have to deal with 50 people who are all trying to do the same thing. And they’re all on their own journeys in life to get to winning. That is a huge challenge.
What impact will this season’s IPL have on the upcoming World Cup? Teams are scoring heavily this season…
I’m fascinated by the impact-player rule. That’s had an effect. I’m on the MCC world cricket committee and one important thing we talk about is the cricket pitches. You want Test cricket to survive, get the pitches right.
Like it’s a contest between bat and ball in Australia. The ball swings around and bounces. Awesome. You come to India and the ball spins, contest between bat and ball. You can’t leave the screen because the batsman could get out any ball. It is addictive.
At the upcoming World Cup, it will all depend on what the pitches are like. I can’t imagine that the wickets in the West Indies are going to be that flat, maybe Barbados. I’ve got no idea what’s going to happen in America because they’re drop-in pitches.
My belief has always been that we should never forget about the defensive side of T20 cricket. You look at the teams doing really well in this in this IPL, like KKR and Rajasthan Royals. They have good bowlers and so are performing well. Never forget the defensive side of the game. LSG has suffered because a lot of our bowlers dropped out before the league began.
So, when it comes to the World Cup, often the teams with the best bowling attacks will have the best chance to win.
Who are your favourites for the T20 WC?
If you if you look at the trend of World Cups, it’s often the same group of teams on paper. There’s a lot of very good teams. India will obviously be strong. Australia on paper look scarily strong. New Zealand always are the underdogs. They love playing for their country, so they are strong. It is tough to predict at the start of the season who’s going to win. There might be some injuries. It is impossible to predict.
The Indian coach’s position is up for grabs. Will you apply?
(After a laugh and a long pause) Well, I am curious. I’ve never ever thought about it. I have deep respect for any international coach because I understand the pressure, but coaching the Indian team would be an extraordinary role. From what I’ve seen with the amount of talent I’ve seen in this country, it would be fascinating.
What is it like to face a fast bowler, say like Shoaib Akhtar?
If you are facing fast bowlers, you’ve got to have physical courage. The second thing is, if you see the ball come out of the bowler’s hand, it’s like slow motion. All I tried to do was getting my stance right and have proper balance. If you can see the ball released out of the bowler’s fingers, then everything will be okay. It’s then very hard to get out.
You see the ball release because you have hit so many cricket balls. It doesn’t matter how quick it is. But if your stance is just a little bit out and you start falling across or you’re moving at release of the ball, it is like living in a fast-forward movie cartoon. And that’s when you get hit on the body and then it’s not fun.
Do you miss the Pakistan team of the past – tough and competitive?
Yeah, just as we miss a competitive West Indies team. I grew up watching the great West Indies team. You want to see them strong, and you want to see all the other countries strong. We talk about this in the MCC world cricket committee meeting regularly. How do we keep sustaining the health of the other countries? It’s important to have West Indies strong, as important to keep Pakistan strong and as important to keep New Zealand and Sri Lanka strong because that is important for the health of world cricket.
