Amid the swirl of friendships and interests involved in the Justin Langer fiasco, at least one thing unifies us all: whatever you think of their behaviour, it’s always mesmerising to watch the golden generation go. Evidently, they’ve still got it. Their public defence of Langer, their friend and teammate, after he chose to depart as coach rather than accept a six-month contract extension, has even left current players in awe . “Shows why they were so fucking good!” one said. “They stick together and look after each other.” Yes, the player is nameless. Why would any rational being risk incurring the ire of these guys?
It’s true: they do look after each other. If you squint and listen hard enough, the shrill tones provide windows and echoes to what opponents faced back in their day, especially when things got tight.
Former Test captain Steve Waugh, the author of modern cricket’s greatest euphemism, “mental disintegration”, decried Cricket Australia CEO Nick Hockley’s “buzzwords” in his justification for CA’s position on Langer on Instagram. Another Test captain, Adam Gilchrist, replied underneath, “Nicely said skipper.” Damien Martyn noted that the current team “better keep winning”.
Langer’s former opening partner Matthew Hayden, who once said that cricket “has got such a huge role to play in terms of [the] stability of mankind”, referred to sitting Test skipper Pat Cummins’ comments before Langer’s departure, in which he said a review of Langer’s performance was fair, as “garbage”. The image is clear. Cummins is the new bat, he’s run-out the best player, and the cordon’s going to let him know.
It has been spellbinding to witness the public criticism – direct and implicit – from some of the past generation. But it’s instructive, too. Waugh and his contemporaries were the busiest manufacturers of the branding and mythology behind Baggy Green Inc. They are the arch custodians. The keepers of the flame. All self-appointed. As arguably the most successful team to ever play the game, it may well be they are convinced of the primacy of their views on all related matters by extension. As the contemporary embodiment of everything that made the baggy green great, at some level they may feel a move to reject Langer is a move to reject their group.
There is a certain sadness to this. With Langer around, the team was still theirs. But the sun rises and the sun sets. Power is hard won, especially when wrested from this mob, as former oppositions will attest. They have been ferocious in public, even though some have been sending altogether more friendly messages to players in private, which is curious. Much as people protest that they simply don’t like the way Langer’s departure played out, it could also be argued that there was never going to be a dignified way to move on from Langer, who had doggedly set out his stall for a dynastic reign. Chairman of Selectors George Bailey on Tuesday encouraged former players to “reach out and get a good understanding of what’s happening.” Perhaps the golden generation don’t want to know.
Cricket Australia is complicit. This is not the first time they’ve leveraged brand over substance. And to this end, Langer did exactly what he was there to do. Following the sandpaper scandal, he was co-opted by CA as a PR tool to rebuild the team in his image. His pure coaching credentials were moderate, and at best a secondary consideration. The soft power of aura and memory were greater sales tools than hard skills of coaching and education. Safety sells, and so does nostalgia.
Think Steve Waugh on the balcony at Lord’s in 2019, Ricky Ponting the same. This stuff isn’t limited to cricket. In a piece for the Guardian last October about Manchester United’s own crisis, Barney Ronay wrote after a 5-0 thrashing that then-coach Ole Gunnar Solksjaer was “a manager in the job because of heritage power and brand-maintenance”.
Some would argue that so too was Langer. His appointment was partly a brand play, and one only needs to watch Amazon’s The Test to understand the centrality of Brand Langer to Australian cricket at that time. In a moment of crisis, leveraging Langer – who tells us he is synonymous only with “honesty, respect, trust, truth, performance” – was the most effective antidote available for Cricket Australia to continue selling the game.
Sadly, actual cricket coaching is missing from much of this conversation. It remains an amorphous, nebulous thing in this sport, jolting loosely according to the whims and style of the candidate in question. Langer approached the job like he did as a player, attempting to transplant his grit and single-mindedness, with mixed success. Despite Cummins’s magnanimity toward Langer’s “tweaks and changes”, those who argue Relaxo-Langer 2.0 took them to a new level at the T20 World Cup and the Ashes are misguided. The “back seat” was imposed on him, not chosen by him. The team’s subsequent success is correlated, and though many see this episode as a car crash, a larger car crash awaited were he retained.
At its base level, the argument to retain him runs like this: “how can a team want to sack a coach when they’re winning?” But instead of a rhetorical dunk, maybe the authors might try, in good faith, to answer the question.
