John Buchanan: Short audio preview

Frank Dick: Short audio preview

Event Review

The time: early September, 2005. The place: the Oval in south London. At the centre of the pitch, under a bright blue sky, England's best cricketers were preparing for the most important match of their lives. The Ashes seemed within reach for the first time in 18 years, and several dozen photographers were crouched at the boundary rope, documenting the team's newfound confidence.

The players looked impressive, chopping balls into the nets and bowling ferociously under the guidance of a team of specialist coaches. Yet one man nearby felt certain he could ruin the party. He was standing in a second-floor conference room in the OCS Stand - the beautiful crescent-shaped terrace built recently at a cost of around £25m - and he was addressing the London Business Forum (LBF).

John Buchanan is one of the world's most successful coaches. From 1999 to 2005, he helped Australia to dominate Test cricket, losing only 11 times in 74 matches. Now he was about to share his ideas with a 200-strong audience of businesspeople, at a pivotal moment in the history of his sport. The English attendees were torn between the desire to learn from a master and the desire to see his laurels knocked off as quickly as possible.

"In case you wonder why I'm spending a lot of time on this side of the stage, it's because I'm keeping one eye on the England team," Buchanan joked at the start of his speech. He leaned his tall, wiry frame to his right and peered over the audience, who were facing away from the floor-to-ceiling windows. Then, after a moment's reflection, he relaxed and said: "Actually, I'm not sure if I care what they're up to."

Whether this remark was the product of overconfidence or a slip of concentration, we shall never know. Nevertheless, Buchanan impressed the LBF audience with his approach to coaching, which was simultaneously holistic and meticulous, bold and humble.

"The role of a coach in terms of relationships is to take people somewhere they haven't been before," he said, adding that it also depends on listening: "Our players should feel challenged but not intimidated. Each should be able to ask whatever they want to. They're not positioned according to their status - old or young, Test player or non-Test player, capped or not - the objective is to grow them as individuals."

Buchanan said he made it his business to understand every influence on his players. "You need to understand what makes people tick," he said. "What's their background? What's important in their lives? If these things are sorted, their cricket will improve." However, he added, "My job as a coach is to make myself redundant. I need to retreat from a close relationship with each player because, the further I get back, the more accountable and responsible the individual feels, and that's very important."

Every cricket fan in the audience could attest to the spirit of the Australian team, having seen it romp home to so many victories in the past, many against England, after recovering from almost certain defeat. It was no surprise, then, to hear Buchanan extolling "culture and values" as a major contributing factor to success. Together, they were the "glue that binds everything together," he said.

In addition to the sense of equality and openness between players, there was also self-analysis. "Historically we've been known as sledgers," Buchanan admitted, using the cricketing slang for verbal abuse on the field, used in an attempt to "psych out" opposing players. "However, apart from the recent Nottingham Test where our captain and one of our other players was fined, we've actually been the best-behaved side in world cricket over the past year."

In spite of its recent loss of form, Australia was strategising for the long term, Buchanan said. "Our parent organisation, Cricket Australia, has the vision of making cricket Australia's favourite sport... over football, surfing and other outdoor sports," he said. "We are in sync with that vision. Ever since I have been associated with the team we have been trying to change how the game is being played."

He explained that cricket's popular appeal had improved thanks to faster run-scoring, which was in part a consequence of Australia's aggressive playing style. He also said major changes in style were few and far between. One of the only examples was the "bodyline" style of bowling pioneered by England captain Douglas Jardine in 1932. It involved bowling continuously at the body of the batsman rather than the stumps, in an effort to force errors through physical intimidation, and was later outlawed.

Yet another sea-change is imminent, Buchanan suggested. "The concept ahead is that of the two-sided cricketer [someone with equivalent skills in batting and bowling]", he said. "In May 2007, there will be another World Cup, and by then we want to be the best-skilled team the world has ever seen."

Like most modern sports coaches around the world, Buchanan believes detailed statistical analysis can help identify and improve the best players. He described three of the most important metrics for his cricketers as "patience, partnerships and pressure", referring to their ability to keep themselves in the game and change its tempo.

To conclude his speech, he recommended a book called "Moneyball," by Michael Lewis, which profiled Billy Beane, the general manager of a Major League Baseball team in Oakland, California. Beane overturned the conventional wisdom of buying and cultivating strong hitters and pitchers, believing instead that consistency in certain areas of play was a better indicator of future success. "Within a few years, Oakland had won the World Series," Buchanan said. "So I urge you to look at your industry in the same way. You've got plenty of statistics, but are they the right ones, and are you looking at them in the right way?"

Buchanan yielded the stage to Frank Dick OBE, the ebullient Scotsman who has coached sports stars such as Daley Thompson, Boris Becker and Denise Lewis; and corporate stars such as BT, Unilever and Shell. Dick had the silver hair of a pensioner, the stocky frame of a middle-aged man in good shape and the energy of a teenager. He kicked off insisting there are only two types of people in the world: mountain people and valley people.

"Valley people are the ones you bump into at parties and they start off their sentences the same way every time: 'I would have...', 'I should have...' or 'I could have...'," he said. "Then they treat you to an excuse for why they honestly believe they're not in control of the life they live... Valley people think winning is the same thing as not losing, so for them a draw is a fantastic result. Valley people are very proud of their T-shirt that says 'I will survive'. The tragedy of such people is they're losers but they don't know that they are."

By contrast, he said, mountain people "decide in life to take the risk of winning". Some people find that expression odd, he added, but "I find the other one extremely odd, the risk of losing. Because where's the risk in that? ... You don't have to train for it."

At the heart of Dick's coaching philosophy is a very particular definition of the word "winning". "Winning is being better today than you were yesterday, every day," he said. "When you come through school you're persistently measured against other people, but although a time may come when you want to compare yourself with others, it's most important to compare yourself with your previous performance."

Dick recalled how he encouraged a young female sprinter who came last in a race to regard herself as a winner because she had beaten her personal best. "Does anybody think Linford Christie learned to win by running against slower people?" he asked the LBF audience. "Not every sprinter you work with in life is going to be as fast as Linford Christie but they can all run faster, just as you can measure yourself against your previous performance and make yourself better."

Other vivid illustrations of Dick's points were provided in the form of video footage from various sporting events - for example, the speed skater who won gold because he stayed within his limits at the back of the field and prevailed when all the others crashed out; the team of long-distance runners who won gold and silver after their best performer fell early in the race, and they took it in turns to lead and motivate him to victory.

Like Buchanan, Dick believed in gathering and mining as much data as possible about a sportsperson's performance and calibrating it to specific events. He boiled his approach down to the following key questions:

1. What's the best result achievable over the agreed period?
2. What performance will get the result?
3. What's the level of quality/consistency required to make this performance a probability? ("If you can only perform one time out of ten then why bother to go to the Olympics at all?", he asked.)
4. What's the fitness you require for that level of quality/consistency?
5. What's the performance and development plan you require to go through this process?
6. What controls will ensure accurate process monitoring? ("It generally takes the human organism six weeks to adapt to a new regime," he suggested.)
7. What support do you need to deliver? What human resources do you require? Can you lead this team?
8. Are you as a coach, coachable?

Expanding on the last point, Dick concluded: "I believe you're neither a coach nor an athlete consistently. Even now, Jack Nicklaus works with a coach once a year to realign his swing."