Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Where's Bob Woolmer when you need him?

In the wake of another English cricketing humiliation, it's inevitable now that Duncan Fletcher will have to go. Even a relatively establishment figure like BBC cricket correspondent Jon Agnew is saying so.

I have to confess that England's loss against South Africa has left me rather red-faced in the office this morning. I was convinced that the Proteas' notorious flakiness in tense situations would work to our advantage and that everything would come good, but this was clearly something of a triumph of hope over experience.

The real sadness in my view about England's failure is that we, and cricket generally, have been deprived of the one man whose coaching genius could have restored our fortunes. Bob Woolmer should have been made England coach long ago, in my view. Now he will never get the chance.

I suppose the job will now go to Tom Moody, although I find it odd that we would consider appointing an Aussie to run our cricket team when the common consensus around the time of Sven Goran Eriksson's departure was that appointing a German to run our football team was out of the question.

free web site hit counter

3 comments:

James Higham said...

I was sort of hoping you'd let this one go by, Paul.

skipper said...

Cricket and soccer different sports but isn't it odd how in both recent world cups our teams scraped through the early rounds, all the time with much talk of a BIG performance in the offing but when it came to the big teams we crumbled even more pathetically. I'm off sport for a good while now....

Anonymous said...

Skipper, I'd stay off sport at least until the autumn. I have a suspicion it may be more of the same in the rugby world cup.