Jason Gillespie: ‘It could be a challenging summer for Australia’

Leeds: The clarity of Jason Gillespie’s coaching philosophy, forged in sunlit places as different as Adelaide and Kwekwe in Zimbabwe, pours out of him on a raw day at Headingley.

Yorkshire are back where they presumably belong in Division One after Gillespie led them to promotion in his first season as head coach and cricket will dominate the rest of this sporting year with successive Ashes series beginning here this summer.

Gillespie played 71 Tests for Australia, 18 of them against England, and featured in five Ashes series and won all of them except the last — the epic clash from the summer of 2005. Yet the former fast bowler, the first cricketer of Aboriginal descent to play for Australia, talks in deceptively plain language as he explains why, an hour earlier, his squad had been whooping and cackling during their pre-season photographs. They looked and sounded like a definition of happiness.

“We keep things as simple and fun as possible,” Gillespie says, stripping away the grim and tangled cliches of Yorkshire cricket.

“We have very clear and simple plans of how we want to play cricket. We believe if you put the time and effort into everything, you will enjoy it. I tell them: ‘Be safe in the knowledge you’ve done the work. Just go out and play.’ We give them that freedom.”

It is intriguing to compare Gillespie’s honest simplicity with the fraught mess that currently characterises the relationship Australia’s coaching hierarchy share with their players.

“We did the interview for this job over the phone, from Zimbabwe, on a conference call,” Gillespie says, remembering being quizzed by Geoff Boycott and Michael Vaughan.

“I’d applied to be Western Australia’s assistant coach under Mickey Arthur [now coaching Australia] a few years ago. I also did it over the phone and got a really bad vibe.”

Did that vibe come from Arthur?

“Yeah,” Gillespie says. “You can just tell. I didn’t interview well. I then interviewed for the South Australia bowling job — and did badly again. I was trying to please everyone and tell them what they wanted to hear. I vowed not to do that again. So with Yorkshire I was very direct and upfront. I think the simplicity and honesty impressed them.”

It seems imperative to ask this new master of coaching coherence his opinion of Australia’s recent chaos.

“The homework thing?” Gillespie says, considering the fiasco which resulted in four Australian players being dropped during their tour of India. “I’d obviously heard about Mickey Arthur’s style but in a management position now I can empathise a bit when [Arthur and Australia’s captain Michael Clarke] say the little things aren’t being done by the players. If you want to be the best you make sure those little things get done. But why has it been allowed to reach the point where they have to leave players out? It shouldn’t get to that point.”

Did he have a gut feeling that Arthur, a South African, might not gel as Australia’s coach after his unhappy interview?

“That’s a separate issue and down to me interviewing badly,” Gillespie says. “Mickey was actually very good in that interview. We don’t know the full picture but I find it difficult to understand how Australia’s team culture could reach the point where there is back-chatting, where guys are not wearing the correct uniform or filling in their wellness chart.”

Shane Watson, Australia’s vice-captain, was at the heart of the strife. “I played a lot with Watto, and against him,” Gillespie says.

“He likes to do things his way and even takes his own physio on tour. But we can’t gloss over the fact that, as a Test cricketer, he hasn’t been doing the job. He’s decided not to bowl and concentrate on his batting but the last couple of years he hasn’t been performing. Is he in Australia’s best XI? If he is, then support him to the hilt. If not, make the call and move on. People are a little clouded with selection at Cricket Australia.”

Their entire top-order batting appears beset by confusion.

“Yep,” Gillespie nods. “There are issues. If they don’t feel they’re the best six batters then change them. But if they are, then give them a good run and back them privately and publicly.”

The old quick, however, is excited by his new fast-bowling equivalents.

“Australia’s bowling is strong — and they’ll surprise a few people in England,” he says.

Yet Gillespie stresses that England rightly start as favourites. “It could be a challenging summer for Australia. Their batting is the issue and Jimmy Anderson will pose the biggest problems. Australians struggle against good swing bowling and Anderson is the best in the business. Steve Finn is also very impressive. He’s a big, tall bowler who hits the track hard... [Stuart] Broad does both so it’s a good, balanced attack and [Tim] Bresnan and [Graham] Onions can fill roles accordingly. And Graeme Swann is the best finger spinner around. They’re in a pretty good place.”

— Guardian News & Media Ltd