Former Australia coach John Buchanan, while speaking on the Cricket Life Stories YouTube series, recalled how he and Shane Warne differed on approaches to coaching, during their time together in the Australian team in the Noughties.
Buchanan and Warne were widely known to have a strained relationship in the Australian set-up with, Michael Clarke, the former Australia captain, recently revealing the leg-spinner “did not respect” Buchanan and didn’t always pay heed to the coach’s instructions.
Buchanan, who played seven first-class games for Queensland in the late Seventies, recalled how Warne preferred coaches who were far more experienced at the international circuit.
"There was his decision to hold vocabulary lessons during the '05 Ashes, the intention being to encourage his players to use a list of polysyllabic words in everyday sentences."
From the archives, @Jo_Wisden on the relationship between Warne and Buchanan.https://t.co/xG25vdN4nr
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) May 26, 2020
“You’d love everybody to be loving what you’re doing, but it will not always be the case,” Buchanan said. “With Shane, I mean, we just came from really different backgrounds. His view on coaches was, as I said at one stage, what gets you from A to B and I think he was just an incredibly gifted player who possibly didn’t realise how good he was, even though he did some amazing things.
“His view was that the type of coach needed to be someone like a Bobby Simpson maybe previously, or Allan Border, those type of players who played a heck lot of Test cricket, and therefore, had that street credibility about playing the game.
“From my point of view, I never approved of this because I wasn’t that. But what I did try to bring was the ability to challenge Shane in different ways. Thankfully [I] found ways that that could happen, and he really took up the challenge, it was one of the small parts and parcels of his incredible successes as a great of the game.”
Buchanan admitted that, as an international coach, it’s rather difficult to make everyone align with your own style. “Even through the period [of international coaching],” Buchanan said, “there will always be critics because no matter how good or bad you’re doing, some people will like you, like what you are doing and the other people will be really resistant. That will always be the case.
“When you move into an international side, you are exposed to far more into the media, far more introspection into what you’re doing and how you’re doing those things. And of course, the media really do like to find stories that they can keep alive and often those are personal and can be unsavoury in different stages.”
