Sympathy but no tea

India’s first foreign coach loved his job. But, he says in his excellent memoir, banning beverages from training was the least of his worries

John Wright’s Indian Summers
by John Wright, with Sharda Ugra and Paul Thomas.
Souvenir Press, £18.99

Reviewed in SPIN, August 2007

In the spring of 1997, the ex-New Zealand Test opener John Wright was working as a sales rep for a cake company. He had never coached a first-class cricket team. Within four years, he was coach of India, the most fanatically supported team in the world, and right in the middle of an epic series win over Steve Waugh’s previously all-conquering Australians.

Indian Summers is all about Wright’s sudden immersion in top-class coaching and the excitingly bizarre world of Indian cricket culture. 

In his five years as the side’s first-ever foreign coach, they became the most successful team in Indian cricket history. 

Based on Wright’s diaries, Indian Summers is  tightly written – with the aid of two ghosts, one a novelist, one a journalist – and full of colour, context and observation. Wright is genuinely wide-eyed about the journey he is on, sharing his theories of coaching and his frustrations with Indian cricket: the horse-trading nature of team selection means that quality players miss out all the way from under-16 level to Test level; the instant celebrity and riches on offer to young players can turn their heads, and make them lose focus on their cricket; the celebrity of older players can make them undroppable.

Some of the team’s hilarious ‘training’ methods make Wright’s early to-do lists easily compiled: sharing a gym with the no-nonsense Aussies during 2001, one India star sits half-heartedly on a bike in his sandals, while a butler brings him tea and sandwiches. Wright cuts out tea at training, brings in a fitness coach, focuses on fielding and weeds out those whose lack of fight had stopped the team winning overseas in over a decade. 

Wright is in awe of the team’s natural talent – but frustrated by their lack of application. After one disappointing dismissal, he refuses to let Virender Sehwag back in the dressing room.

Wright is also awed by the fandom that engulfs the Indian national side: villagers in isolated areas waiting for hours for a passing glimpse of the team bus; low-paid workers in the street thanking him sincerely for doing the privileged, well-paid job of being national coach.

This is an genuinely reflective and revealing account of a Westerner’s life at the heart of Indian cricket, but it’s not warts-and-all: allusions are made, for example, of Wright not seeing eye-to-eye with captain Sourav Ganguly, but we are given few details. Narratives of specific matches and series are sparse, Wright’s insightful narrative having no need of the standard filler of sports autobiographies. (Though he does find space to include a song he wrote about his time in India; something coach Fletcher’s England memoirs will surely struggle to match). Indian Summers is a crisp, entertaining read that puts most of the rest of the flabby genre to shame. Duncan Steer

In a nutshell

Inside the world of India’s first foreign coach

Biggest surprise?

Wright including his own Dylanesque song about life on the road: “The mini-bar has run away on me/the paintings hang like sleeping cats.” But of course!
Verdict •••••