In his affectionate foreward to Bob Woolmer’s Art and Science of Cricket, the iconic Richie Benaud has hoped the book would be a “great success.”

The late Woolmer’s dream-come-true should actually be a bestseller.

Sir Donald Bradman’s The Art of Cricket has reigned supreme for half-a-century but the time, perhaps, has come for a more contemporary offering to take top billing.

Not that the late Sir Don’s effort, a starting point for generations, won’t remain a classic.

It was on India’s 1996-97 tour of South Africa that the Kanpur-born Woolmer first told The Telegraph about the book he’d been planning in collaboration with fellow-Capetonian Prof. Tim Noakes.

“There’s no better sports scientist than Tim and, so, he’ll be taking care of the science aspect… I’ll do the rest,” is what he’d then said.

Woolmer, if one recalls correctly, wanted to finish the book in a “couple of years,” but eventually took almost a decade.

Specifically, he completed it shortly before his unexplained death in Kingston, during the 2007 World Cup, but the book could hit the stands only recently.

The preface, by the way, includes the rather emotional “I’m indebted to so many who have helped contribute to the book… Above all to my father, who placed a bat and ball in my cot two days after my birth in the hospital in Kanpur, India, and said ‘Son, I hope this will be your life.’ He knew more than any other that this great game would engulf me and take over my whole life…”

Take his life too.

Woolmer has dedicated the book to wife Gill and his sons (Dale, Russell).

Respected as a visionary coach, certainly one obsessed with technology (the laptop was just a start), Woolmer worked with two national teams --- South Africa and Pakistan. His death came towards the end of his innings with the Inzamam-ul Haqs.

In his book, Woolmer has listed a dozen roles which a modern-day coach has to play: Manager, communicator, guidance counsellor, diplomat, historian, social worker, paramedic, scientist, motivator, publicity agent and media liaison officer, disciplinarian.

That’s Woolmer’s order, but the last role would often be pretty high up, especially when he had to deal with one Shoaib Akhtar!

The following are coaching-related extracts:

I telephoned Sir Donald Bradman and said I thought coaches should wear concrete boots and be chucked into Sydney harbour. The Don’s reply? ‘It’s not deep enough!’

Arthur Morris, Australian Test batsman 1940-55

For many who grew up in the game before the professional era, the idea of a professional coach is abhorrent. The notion summons up visions of an officious little man enlisted to confuse good players with obscure, over-complicated technical jargon, psychobabble, and endless lectures on game plans and personal goals. As a result, many younger followers of the game tend to be ambivalent or at least non-committal about the role of a coach. All it takes is a slump in their team’s performance for all the old-fashioned prejudices to come out, and for Morris and Bradman’s concrete boots to be dusted off.

Many of the criticisms and questions levelled at coaches tend to be non-technical. ‘What are you doing about lifting morale? Aren’t the lads over-confident? Why isn’t the team fitter? Why is the media saying that the team is over-fit and has peaked too soon? Why didn’t you select X when he’s the fastest bowler in the country? Why did you select X when he’s the fastest bowler in the country — and always bowls short?’ And so on ad infinitum. Indeed, it is this fairly unsophisticated level of questioning that underlines the role of the coach. Anyone can criticize, but it takes skill, training, and years of observation and practice to become a coach capable of finding and implementing solutions to problems like those listed above and many, many more.

Perhaps this was best summed up by Richie Benaud and Dennis Lillee, two of the game’s straighter shooters, in their thoughts on coaching (their writings on the subject are well worth tracking down). A coach is doing his job, wrote Benaud, when he is able to not only spot but correct errors:

Detecting of an error is the easy part. There are approximately a million television viewers watching a match every day and ninety-nine of every hundred of those watchers are able to detect the errors the players are making. No more than one in the hundred, if that, would be capable of proper correction (1998).

Lillee, who was instrumental in developing the Indian Fast Bowling Academy in Madras, echoed this view:

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard a coach say, ‘You’re falling away — stand up straight.’ It just makes me laugh because nobody deliberately tries to fall over when attempting to bowl. The reason they are falling away is because, mechanically, something is wrong. If you cannot explain to the player why it’s happening and show him how he can fix the problem, it will not go away. He might be able to stand straight for a couple of balls, but inevitably he will start to fall away again. It was band-aid coaching, not corrective teaching.

Even now we need more people to become more involved in the mechanics of bowling, to find the reasons why an action clicks or why some bowlers bowl continually down leg side when they are trying not to. You cannot just tell the player; you have to show him and explain so he can understand the mechanics, and then work it out for himself by watching a video of his action. Thus the coach coaches himself out of that particular job and moves on to the next one. Some coaches don’t want to work that way, but I do. Get in, do the job, and get out.

The modern coach has to be more than an analyst, and considerably more than a repairman or cricketing mechanic. The game must survive in the face of increasing competition from many other sporting activities and pastimes; and in order to survive it must not only be taught, but be taught well. Yet while the coach has a vital role to play, he (and increasingly, she) must never imagine that they are indispensable, or start thinking about their abilities and skills as marketable assets in a growing industry. The coach is there to help the players first and foremost. He is nothing without them, and the job is primarily about them. That is why Lillee’s words are good ones to remember: if this chapter is about anything, it is about getting in, doing the job, and getting out.

WHO AND WHAT IS ACRICKET COACH?

The modern professional coach is a diagnostic and corrective specialist, someone who is paid to see problems and fix them. But the handful of full-time contracted coaches is dwarfed by the tens of thousands — perhaps even hundreds of thousands — of dedicated amateurs coaching cricket around the world. So in
considering a profile of the average coach, perhaps it is more useful to describe this huge majority. All coaches, whether they are parents, schoolteachers, retired players, volunteers in disadvantaged communities, or simply enthusiasts, share three basic traits:

They are willing and able to teach the game of cricket;

They love cricket and want to pass its traditions on to the next generation;

They recognize the social, emotional and psychological benefits of playing cricket well, and want to give children the best possible chance of enjoying these benefits