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richard pybus
Coaching the subcontinent “impossible”
By Will 2 years ago, mid-October, 2 Comments »
I suppose the western prejudiced would agree with this by default. Coaching India and Pakistan is fraught with difficulty, and Mike Atherton goes into more depth about the “impossible” job that has faced Richard Pybus, Bob Woolmer and others.
2 Comments »Pybus could not cope with the irrationality and the uncertainty of Pakistan cricket. Using an unfortunate analogy, given the present situation, he said this of his time there: “They have an amazing capacity to ambush themselves … you’re always sitting there waiting for someone to lob a hand grenade and waiting for it to go off. You can never plan with such a team because you don’t know what is happening tomorrow.” Dismissed twice, Pybus urged Pakistan to take a more scientific – meaning Western – approach to their cricket.
[...]
Woolmer may have been better placed than Pybus to cope with the increasingly Islamist outlook of the post-match-fixing Pakistan team under Inzamam-ul-Haq because Woolmer’s South Africa side were the most overtly religious of the Western teams. Indeed, he was sanguine about the religious orthodoxy of the majority of his players, the prayers before, during and after play and the adherence to Ramadan; it was the unpredictable nature of their cricket that he could not understand.
The stress of coaching a team who lost to Ireland, as Pakistan did in the 2007 World Cup, was too much for him, especially because, unlike the mid-1990s, when match-fixing was rife, there was no evidence that Pakistan lost the match for financial gain. Coaching Pakistan was, sadly, Woolmer’s last job; a lonely hotel room in Jamaica his last port of call.
