John Wright: ‘I wouldn’t need 13-man support team’

John Wright – one of the leading candidates for the vacant England coach’s job – says he would not need the 13-man backroom staff currently used by the side.

England’s sizeable back-up staff, developed under Peter Moores, has attracted criticism over a winter that has seen just two wins in 17 games.

Wright, currently working as a selector and coaching consultant for New Zealand, coached India for five years from 2000 and, with captain Sourav Ganguly, was credited with developing the most successful Indian team in history.

“I only ever operated with a physio and a fitness trainer and once, when we went to Australia, a bowling coach,” said Wright, speaking exclusively to SPIN magazine. “Every coach is different and has different ideas. But players need space, because they’ve got to compete. It’s good if they’ve got clear minds and understand perfectly what they need to do.”

Discussing the epic 2001 series win that ended Steve Waugh’s Australians’ record run of Test wins, he said: “Before that series, we’d had a 10-day camp where we’d worked from 7am, with two three-hour sessions per day, then planning in the evening. It was only me, the physio and the team – I quite like that sort of intimacy. But you can’t coach [VVS] Laxman and [Rahul] Dravid to bat the way they did at Kolkata. They did that. It was just great to watch and to be thankful they’d saved my job.

“You want players that want to be world class and not just represent the country – they want to be ranked in the top three in the world and that’s it. If you get enough of those in your team, the winning is going to take care of itself. It’s that simple. You put around those champions some people who can support them.”

Asked whether the personality clashes that led to the departure of coach and captain Kevin Pietersen and Peter Moores had been an issue when coaching India’s team of superstars, Wright said not.

“You’re part of a group so there have to be some group norms. They knew it wasn’t a good idea for them to be late for the bus. We tried to create some intensity at training and made sure no-one did anything to harm the team. Just simple things. Any of those simple things and sensible things that people can respect and understand, and know that they actually matter.

“As a coach, you have some non-negotiables. Just simple things that everyone in the team can keep, whether they’re a rock star, whether they’re the best player on the team or the least experience.

“I was very lucky with the boys I worked with. They have certain pressures that you have to understand and certain demands placed on them. They have a completely different set of demands than the young boy that has just come into the team so you’ve got to work around those sorts of things and understand the reason they’re there for is for cricket – and they’ve got to produce performances.”

The full interview with John Wright appears in the April issue of SPIN magazine in our 10-page special on international coaching, which also features interviews with Andy Flower and Mickey Arthur.

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 •••••