Quotes of the Day

My brother reckons that the best piece of coaching he ever received came from an affable bloke called Bill Wawn, who in the early 1980s in Sydney looked after a team of useful teenaged cricketers. Padded up and nervous one Saturday afternoon, my brother and his batting partner were about to head out to the middle to chase a challenging target when Bill sauntered over. "All right, boys, no silly buggers," he said. "But if the ball's there to be hit, lay the wood into it." And that was it. Short. Simple. Kind of funny in a way that's hard to explain. But also the essence of batting in a sentence. The pair strode off and soon had their team on course for victory.

As my brother never advanced much beyond park cricket and was never exposed to any famed coach, one might ask what value should be attached to his rating of Bill's advice. Fair point. But as someone who wrote about sport full-time for 11 years and has heard many of Australia's most celebrated coaches address their players - in modes both Churchillian and fatherly - I can still see the magic in Bill's words. It's easy to talk yourself numb about the complexities of coaching in the professional era. And sure, at the top of any sport there's a lot of stuff coaches must get their head around. But the complexity can also be a trap.

Lately, the laser of public scrutiny has fixed on three of Australia's highest-profile mentors. Wayne Bennett quit as coach of the Australian rugby league team on Dec. 9, a week after the Australian Rugby Union sacked Eddie Jones as coach of the Wallabies. Despite a catastrophic mission failure in England and calls for a change at the helm, John Buchanan has kept his job as coach of the national cricket team. In temperament and style, the three coaches have little in common. But perhaps their setbacks these past few months can be traced to the same thing: each man has lost touch with his game's simplicities.

Before the capitulation to New Zealand in the Tri-Nations final on Nov. 26, it had been 27 years since Australia had lost a rugby league series or tournament. Bennett knows the game backwards, but in England he seemed to forget some immutable footballing truths, like selecting sides based on form rather than loyalty, and ensuring that if a team is nothing else, it should at least be keen. In the final, "Australia looked old, tired and bored," wrote former New South Wales coach Phil Gould, who used to inspire his players with war stories or late-night walks in empty stadiums - anything that would get them bursting to play. Coaches forget at their peril that, along with skills, tactics are merely the ribbons and jewelry of football. Toughness and enthusiasm are its flesh and bone.

Jones' fall had been coming for a while. His supporters pointed to his feat of guiding the Wallabies to the final of the last World Cup, but the side was impressive just once in that campaign. The Wallabies' loss to Wales on Nov. 26 was their eighth defeat in nine Tests. Each time, they retreated to camp amid a buzz about grueling sessions and tactical fine-tuning, only to play just as badly the next time. Many observers have railed about favoritism shown to the ageing captain. But the team's problems go beyond George Gregan. Success in rugby - an infuriatingly stop-start game - starts with the scrum, and Jones leaves behind an Australian scrum that is an embarrassment. While the back line can execute moves of dazzling geometry, they too seldom touch the ball, partly because the brutes in the engine room simply can't push as hard as the other mob.

Buchanan presided over the failed defense of the Ashes during the northern summer, when England beat Australia at cricket for the first time since 1986-87. You can't blame him for everything that went wrong, but you can blame him for some of it. Buchanan could out-analyze Hercule Poirot. But in complacent teams it's the basics that slip first, and Australia's fielding, running between the wickets, and discipline went to seed. Buchanan either didn't notice or couldn't arrest the slide. It was hard to tell which, because his arguments about the merits of Australia's performances were, by the end, eccentric - akin to saying that a piece of music is better than it sounds. Bob Simpson, a Buchanan predecessor, subscribed to the mantra drummed into boys in short pants: catches win matches. He ran fielding sessions with relish, driving the players until they could barely stand. Buchanan, by contrast, is known for doing his best work in front of a computer.

Coaches tend to take themselves very seriously these days. The line about a coach being only as good as his players is simplistic, but contains more than a kernel of truth. All he can do is help them to perform at the outer edges of their ability. To this end, loads of money, whiz-bang training facilities and umpteen assistants usually help, but boiled down, all sports are pretty simple. In testing times, the wise coach steers his team back to first principles. In Bill's speech of 20 years ago, old stagers like Bennett, Jones and Buchanan might just hear an echo of their younger selves.

• Daniel Williams
• Never mind the drawing board: Australia's coaches must go back even further