Many tourists unravel in India. So it was, with Mickey Arthur.
The desperately sudden end of Arthur’s tenure as Australian cricket coach can be traced to India.
That horrific 4-0 Test series loss in March. The homework affair.
How did Arthur let things get so bad that four Australian cricketers had to be suspended?
Cricket Australia’s board and management wanted to know. Where was team discipline?
Arthur assured them it was the proverbial line in the sand – a line that never need be crossed again.
Then David Warner punched a Pommie batsman in a Birmingham bar.
CA chief James Sutherland was furious. At Warner. And, pointedly, at “the team”.
“David Warner has done a despicable thing but I also hold the team to account here,” Sutherland thundered 10 days ago.
“I am also very disappointed in the team. There was certain things that led to this situation at 2.30 in the morning. There is not a lot of good that happens at 2.30 in the morning in a pub or a nightclub.
“I believe that the team as a whole and the people who were around him as a whole also need to take responsibility for what happens. They are under no illusions they have that responsibility.”
By “the team”, Sutherland meant “the coach”.
Sutherland and high performance manager Pat Howard flew to England. What they found obviously alarmed them to the point of sacking the first foreigner to coach Australia’s cricket team.
Until that damned tour of India, things hadn’t been too bad under Arthur, an outsider always destined to be marked hard.
Until that tour of India, Arthur’s Australia won 10 of 15 Test matches.
Now, four months later, he’s gone.
And Australia turn to a cricketer they shunned for so long. Darren Lehmann. Nickname, Boof. A smoker. A drinker. And a deep thinker about cricket.
Lehmann grew up in Adelaide’s rough north and was a prodigious teen batsman; his education in cricket, not a classroom.
A cracking left-hand bat, Lehmann made his first-class debut for South Australia aged just 17.
But with old-school habits of a beer and smoke counting against him, and despite mountain ranges of runs, Lehmann didn’t get a baggy green cap until 10 summers later.
Lehmann played 27 Tests and 117 one-day internationals; made nearly 26,000 first class runs. Then he slipped into coaching.
Lehmann was appointed Queensland coach for the 2011/2012 season. Legend has it, his first decree was a `no dickheads policy’ – only good blokes allowed.
Lehmann took the Sheffield Shield in his first go as coach. And he’s since added a one-day title and Twenty20 trophy with Brisbane Heat.
