John Buchanan

The last time that the Australians toured these shores, their coach, John Buchanan, caused great mirth by using a 2,500-year-old text written by Sun Tzu as a motivational tool.

In The Art of War, the great warrior says: “All warfare is based on deception: Hence, when able to attack we must seem unable; when using our forces we must seem inactive; when we are near we must make the enemy believe we are far away; when we are far away we must make them think we are near.”

For most of this tour Buchanan’s team have been doing a pretty good job of camouflaging their talents.

Has the coach been up to his old tricks again? Sadly not. The defeats by Bangladesh and Somerset were not part of a master plan but they were, for Buchanan, a timely reminder that, no matter how good a team you are, a lack of preparation will find you out.

“There were lots of little reasons why we started so slowly. There were a couple of incidents, which don’t need to be raked over (read Andrew Symonds and ShaneWarne), that distracted us.

“The Twenty20 matches weren’t ideal preparation considering the fact that we’d had a six or seven-week rest period. So we didn’t really have a solid foundation to face up to the kind of stern examination that one-day cricket presents.

“England caught us cold, just as they did during the Champions Trophy last summer.”

Like Clive Woodward, who caught not a cold but more a bout of flu lately, Buchanan is a stickler for preparation and attention to detail.

Like Woodward he has developed a reputation as a bit of a maverick, as someone who thinks ‘outside the box’.

The ambidextrous cricketer was an early theory of his and ‘Pluto’ was an early nickname because some of his ideas were so far out.

It is hard to argue with his results though: after a spell of coaching in grade cricket, he took over his native Queensland, whom he turned from perennial under-achievers to Sheffield Shield champions for the first time in their history.

Stuart Law talked recently of Buchanan’s influence at Queensland, where he brought in fitness coaches, dieticians and masseurs, and changed the atmosphere from being wholly male dominated to one that involved wives, girlfriends and families.

His subsequent success with the national team, using similar methods, has been unparalleled. Only the old pros of Middlesex refused to yield to his methods: Buchanan lasted just one year at Lord’s before the club returned to the reassuring shape of Mike Gatting.

His relative failure at Middlesex tells us a fair bit about Buchanan’s coaching style and a lot about the reluctance to change that has been such a hallmark of English cricket (Buchanan once labelled County cricket as “a true servant of mediocrity”).

Maybe Buchanan is better suited to challenging good players to get better, rather than improving those of more moderate talents.

In the case of Middlesex, he admits he may have been guilty of trying to teach them to run before they could walk. Despite his achievements, there remains a suspicion among some old pros that Buchanan is something of a fraud and is doing nothing more than baby sitting some of the best cricketers that the game has ever produced.

Before those three superfluous games of the last 10 days, Buchanan engaged in a bit of tit-for-tat with Duncan Fletcher.

Since Fletcher was good enough to highlight Australia’s weaknesses, Buchanan thought he would do the same.

Was this bout of sledging between coaches an attempt to mark out their territories, to gain the psychological high-ground in the same way that batsmen and bowlers would prior to a contest?

“I do find out a bit about my opposite number, about how his team likes to play and how he goes about his business. It’s all part of the planning stage but, ultimately, it comes down to how well, or otherwise, you do your own job.”

Is he from the Alex Ferguson or Arsene Wenger school of post-match sociability? More Wenger, it seems.