Dean Jones, former star Australian batsman, admitted to feeling more than a little strange when walking out onto his beloved Melbourne Cricket Ground last summer sporting New Zealand’s colours, a move which couldn’t help but attract some pointed
Lynn McConnell04-Jul-2002Dean Jones, former star Australian batsman, admitted to feeling more than a little strange when walking out onto his beloved Melbourne Cricket Ground last summer sporting New Zealand’s colours, a move which couldn’t help but attract some pointed barbs from local patrons.But Jones, now plying his trade in coaching and the media in his after-playing cricket life, doesn’t regret that for a moment.He points to fellow Australian players like Geoff Marsh helping Zimbabwe cricket, Trevor Chappell having worked with Bangladesh and now a consultant to Pakistan, Bobby Simpson having done cricket consultancy work all around the world, Steve Rixon having coached New Zealand and New Zealand’s John Wright now coaching India.It was just the way of the cricket world, and Jones said he had a very enjoyable three weeks with the New Zealanders, helping to change some of their attitudes to playing a team like Australia.”I had a hoot of a time,” he said when speaking with CricInfo while taking a break in a coaching programme he is working on at New Zealand Cricket’s High Performance Centre at Lincoln University, a facility that he was most impressed with when seeing it for the first time.He said the liaison with New Zealand had also reminded him of what it was like to lose.The match in question was the One-Day International with Australia in Melbourne where Michael Bevan rescued Australia from the position of 82/6 to reach 248 and take victory with three balls to spare.”It took me three days to get over that loss, and I had forgotten what it was like to lose,” he said.Jones said he had seen enough to say that New Zealand should be a certainty for the top four at the World Cup next year. After that it was anyone’s guess.It was no use spending time worrying how they could get over their eternal bugbear of the moment, beating South Africa, because they might never meet in the Cup.”Don’t fight your battles before you have to,” was his advice.New Zealand just needed to keep doing what they were doing, to keep the belief and to stick to the team plan.”New Zealand play the underdog beautifully,” Jones said. Although a cynic might say jousting for the underdog status is New Zealand’s second national sport.But one of the advantages New Zealand did have was that they parked their egos at the door and got on with the job together.”It would be nice to see Stephen Fleming get some more runs. But he is an impressive captain and his handling of the team is brilliant. He is tactically sound and his management of the boys is good.”Shane Bond has the X factor. He is a workhorse who, if you used racing talk, needs a bit of work. He is that type of player but he impressed me,” he said.Jones would like to get more involved in coaching, it is something he enjoys, but he also knows it involves a commitment just as important as when playing.Being able to relate to players was important while his belief was that a coach should work with the aim of making a player believe he could do things better.It was also important to encourage players to think on their feet and for coaches to listen to them.Another must was the fun factor.”The fun aspect has been lost a bit. You have to be able to enjoy a win, and you have to be able to get over a loss.”Celebrating a win did not mean going out and over-imbibing but it was about enjoying the feeling.Jones was concerned that it was harder nowadays to get over a loss because there was so much cricket being played that the time for reflection was minimised.He wonders also about the consequences of concentration on elite players. One of the problems that has emerged is the number of players who walk out of elite programmes and expect to walk straight into state or provincial sides, or even into international cricket, as of right.He was concerned about the emphasis on age-group cricket, especially at the Under-19 level. He was not quite so concerned about the Under-17s.But the older players needed to be exposed more to senior men players rather than to playing against their age-group peers.He highlighted the example of the spin-laden Australian team that won the ICC Under-19 World Cup this year.The spinners did well because younger players generally didn’t know how to play spin, but when they came up against more senior players the spinners were murdered.”Our spinners need to learn to bowl a bit quicker, instead of 70kph they need to be up to 75-85kph and they struggle with that,” he said.Younger players also needed patience. The Australian team at the moment had its top six batsmen who had been in their positions for the last six or seven years, and there were no new players. That was how tough it was to break in.And it might be that of the Under-19 World Cup-winning team at Lincoln this year, one may break into international cricket.”That’s a lot of money being spent for one kid to make it. You might get five good first-class players out of it, but that is the reality,” he said.Jones also felt that younger players now had to cope with an awful lot of information coming their way from the time they played Under-13 grade through to senior. They were exposed to a lot of different coaches during that time and that was tough to cope with.One way around it was to have mentors for the young players, someone for them to talk to and to help them assess the information being provided.Jones still works with a mentor in his post-playing role and said he regarded it as vital to the way he operates. A mentor needed to be someone that players could put their faith and trust in.Cricket overall was in a healthy state and there would be no easy games at the World Cup. But the extent to which preparation and innovation for such an event has changed was highlighted by Jones talking about the plans being made for the 2007 World Cup which is being played in the West Indies.Batsmen nowadays needed to be scoring more in the region of 70 runs per 100 balls. Australia was working on developing players who could throw with both arms with equal skill. That way they would have no weak side when they were fielding in the 30-metre circle.But it was no use starting to work on something like that now for next year’s World Cup, it had to be that far in advance. Attention needed to be paid to bat speed and Jones predicted there would be significant changes made to bats in the near future.Handles on bats needed to be whippier and he compared the shafts of golf clubs used by the long hitters in golf being quite whippy to what needed to happen with bats.Because many of the grounds in the West Indies were smaller, there would be a lot of fours and sixes hit in the 2007 World Cup and countries needed to be working on developing batsmen capable of achieving that sort of work load.Jones was something of an innovator himself in the one-day game and was regarded as the finest exponent of the art of running between the wickets.It wasn’t something that came naturally to him, rather it was the result of watching Pakistan’s Javed Miandad in a match against Victoria in 1983/84 in which he scored 100 runs off 72 balls, yet he hit only three fours.”He ran a lot of twos and threes and didn’t run in circles. I talked to him a bit about it afterwards and then developed it for myself,” he said.Jones normally ran 40-50kms a week during his playing career but didn’t do any specialised sprint work to hone the skill of running between the wickets. Rather he worked on the principle of getting into the crease, then getting out, while running in a straight line. It also had to be worked on with having to run with pads on and holding a bat in the hand.It was like car racing where as drivers pass certain points they know they have to brake to get around the corner up ahead.Jones established where he had to prepare, then make, the turn. It didn’t worry him that he turned blind to the ball. He became very effective at it and more than a few teams thought they had contained him to one run only to find he picked up two, or three when only two looked on.”And when you have got two people running between the wickets like that, it is much harder to stop,” he said.Two other aspects of the modern game also had Jones thinking.He wondered about the amount of cricket being played and felt that if teams were playing 12 Test matches a year they couldn’t really play 34-36 ODIs as well. And he also wondered about the standards of the support mechanisms that many countries now utilise.Yet for all his concerns, the game still retained its fascination, one that has taken him to a new level of involvement which he would like to take even further. Clearly a case of ‘Watch this space.’