The former fast bowler is moving to Zimbabwe to pursue a dream.
‘EXPERIENCE required” is a suffix to many job advertisements. In the expanding field of cricket coaching it even applies, as Jason Gillespie has discovered, to stalwarts with nine years of international playing experience behind them.
It is the reason Gillespie, 36, his wife Anna and their three pre-school-age boys are this weekend relocating from Adelaide to a city of 100,000 in central Zimbabwe for the next seven months – so he can fulfil that ”experience required” clause.
His brief stint in the Indian Cricket League, the ill-fated predecessor of the Indian Premier League, gave him a taste of the lucrative post-Test possibilities as a player and a commentator. Even so, he had an unexplained attraction to coaching.
The suitability of Gillespie for coaching was evident in an August 2009 article he wrote for ESPNcricinfo dissecting Australia’s Ashes loss to England. One of his observations, that paceman Ben Hilfenhaus ”can be so accurate and consistent that he can be a bit predictable”, was emphatically proved in last summer’s Ashes. He also called for Cricket Australia to make chairman of selectors a full-time role, which has two years later become one of the key recommendations of the Argus report.
The initial barrier to Gillespie securing coaching roles was his ICL involvement, as the powerful Indian cricket board successfully persuaded other nations to ban anyone who had been involved in the rebel Twenty20 competition. ”After you’ve played cricket for your country for a decade,” Gillespie lamented, ”to be seen as an outcast was a pretty bitter pill to swallow.”
Once that barrier was cleared and Gillespie’s job applications could officially be considered came his realisation that, ”like anyone else who goes for a job in any walk of life”, experience was essential. The coaching courses he had undertaken were not a substitute for it.
The solution came last year in the form of a conversation with former Zimbabwe fast bowler Heath Streak, now back in the national fold as its bowling coach, that morphed into a job offer: leading the Kwekwe-based MidWest Rhinos. As Zimbabwe was still a year away from ending its six-year Test absence, the first-class structure there could hardly have been in rude health, a reality that ensured Gillespie’s skills would be tested immediately.
One thing he learnt very quickly was to ignore the regimented coaching principles and ”coach-speak” he had been instructed to use.
”I coach with a bit of a gut feel,” he said. ”I like talking to my players just as people and not specifically a coach-to-player relationship. There are times when you need to be firm and
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