Woolmer better coach than player

Former England all-rounder and South African coach Bob Woolmer is the favourite to replace outgoing West Indies cricket coach Roger Harper. This is the latest development following several interviews conducted with leading candidates during the current World Cup in South Africa.

Several meetings have been held with three of the leading candidates, headed by Woolmer and including Trinidad and Tobago’s Gus Logie (on loan to the Canadian team) and former West Indies all-rounder Eldine Baptiste (currently coaching in South Africa). The other contender, after some 40 applications were received, was Australian coach, Bennet King, but there is some opposition in certain circles to the selection of an Australian. Woolmer belongs to a select band of Test cricketers who enjoyed reputations as international coaches when their playing days were over.  Indeed, Woolmer might be said to be the first to make a bigger impact as coach, in four years with South Africa, than as a player.

For whatever reason, and it might simply have been that his array of gloriously timed off-side strokes made him look a better batsman than he was, he had a disappointing Test career —- especially for a man who, in only his second Test, saved England as they followed on against Australia by holding out for 499 minutes against Dennis Lillee and Jeff Thomson to score 149. Although he added two more hundreds, also against Australia, he first interrupted his Test career by signing for World Series Cricket in 1977, and then ended it forever by joining the rebel South African tour of 1981-82. As a coach, his pioneering use of computers to show, for example, where opposing batsmen scored their runs may have stemmed from an experience of his own, batting against Mike Brearley’s Middlesex. “Knowing I liked the cover-drive, he had Mike Selvey bowl at me wide of off stump, with two slips and two gulleys. In 45 minutes, I scored 12. Then I chased another wide one from Selvey and was caught at second slip.”

In the 1996 World Cup, Graeme Hick was a notable victim of Woolmer’s computer-based analysis, which revealed that if Hick could be kept scoreless for a spell, he tended to flick an off-stump ball in the air to midwicket. The trap was sprung by Fanie de Villiers, and Brian McMillan took the catch. Woolmer was creative and adventurous. But coaching was based on a simple premise: the more enjoyable he could make the game, the better his players would respond. No two fielding-practices were alike when Woolmer was in charge.

FACT FILE
Full name — Robert Andrew Woolmer
Batting — Right-hand top/middle-order
Bowling — Right-arm medium
All-round status — Batsman who bowled
Born  — Kanpur, India, May 14, 1948
Teams — England,  Kent 1968 to 1984.