Can Justin Langer save Australian men’s cricket?

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This was published 5 years ago

Can Justin Langer save Australian men’s cricket?

Justin Langer meditates every morning, has a boxing kangaroo on his buttock and is handy with a motivational quote. Can he turn round his team's dysfunctional culture?

By Jane Cadzow

“If I listened to everyone’s opinion at the moment, I would go crazy.”

“If I listened to everyone’s opinion at the moment, I would go crazy.” Credit: James Brickwood

Justin Langer is standing at the centre of Hobart's Bellerive Oval, chewing gum and gripping a cricket bat. It is November 22, 1999 – the day after his 29th birthday – and he has arrived at one of the pivotal moments of his life. Leading into this Test match against Pakistan, he was in poor form and on the verge of being dropped from the Australian team. In the second innings, he has put in a gritty performance, holding his ground while other batsmen have come and gone in quick succession. Now, with the match in the balance, he faces a delivery from Pakistan's brilliant fast bowler Wasim Akram. Langer swings. His bat nicks the ball as it whizzes past him into the waiting hands of wicketkeeper Moin Khan. Jubilantly, Khan tosses the ball into the air.

Langer, on 76, doesn't walk towards the pavilion. He looks at the umpire, Peter "Porky" Parker, who shakes his head. Not out. The Pakistani players are incredulous. Spectators are puzzled too, because the rule could not be clearer: if a ball hits the bat and is then caught by the opposition, the batsman is dismissed. Few doubt that the edge of Langer's bat made contact with Akram's ball: the sound of the nick carried a long way. "My dad reckons he heard it from the boundary line," says Langer, when we meet for coffee at a Sydney hotel one afternoon this summer. "My teammates thought they heard it from the change-room."

Langer smiles. At 48, he is lean and tanned, with bright blue eyes and a warm, engaging manner. He went on to score 127 runs in that Hobart innings, which he rates as the finest he ever played. His 238-run partnership with Adam Gilchrist – 127 of which came after Langer nicked the ball – took Australia from the brink of defeat to a thrilling victory. Still the highest successful Test run chase on home soil, it also saved Langer's career. He blossomed into one of our most accomplished and longest serving batsmen, finally retiring from Test cricket in 2007 at the age of 36. He still holds the record for the most runs scored by an Australian in first-class matches.

Outstanding player. Outstanding bloke. That's how Langer is widely perceived. He is the author of a collection of memoirs with stirring titles like The Power of Passion and Seeing the Sunrise. He is a popular public speaker, much in demand to give motivational talks to corporate audiences. And since last May, when he stepped into the role of national men's coach and selector just weeks after "Sandpapergate" plunged the sport into crisis, he has been the person entrusted to rescue Australian cricket.

During a Test match against South Africa in Cape Town in March last year, three members of the Australian team – including captain Steve Smith and vice-captain David Warner – colluded to cheat. The plan was to rough up the surface of the ball in the hope of aiding reverse-swing bowling; it was foiled when junior player Cameron Bancroft was captured on camera hiding a piece of sandpaper down the front of his pants. Subsequent inquiries uncovered a deeply flawed culture in the team and the sport's governing body, Cricket Australia. Essentially, winning had become more important than fair play. Among those to lose their jobs was head coach Darren Lehmann, who quit despite being cleared of involvement in the ball-tampering plot.

Langer, who replaced him, has had to try to rebuild a demoralised team missing its two best batsmen, the suspended Smith and Warner. The larger goal has been to salvage cricket's battered reputation. At his first media conference after his appointment, he made clear that he intended to restore honour and integrity to the game. Breaking – or even bending – the rules would not be tolerated. "Everyone knows the difference between right and wrong," he said.

In fact, cricket's moral code can be confusing to outsiders. Is it wrong to stay at the crease when you know – as Langer knew in Hobart all those years ago – that you should be on your way back to the change-room? Of course not, he assures me, sipping his flat white. "I will never apologise for not walking in cricket. That's not cheating." Umpires inevitably make mistakes, he points out, and those errors work both ways: batsmen are sometimes dismissed when they shouldn't be; at other times, they are let off the hook. Accepting a lucky break when it comes your way is only sensible.

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Another question. When people talk about Langer's heroic stand at Bellerive Oval, they tend to overlook the fact that for more than a decade he denied having edged Akram's ball. To reporters, teammates, even his father, he insisted that the noise heard around the ground was made by his bat handle as he swept and missed. Not until 2010, during the telecast of another Hobart Test match between Australia and Pakistan, did he breezily admit that bat and ball connected. Was it wrong to withhold the truth for so long?

Langer tells me he did so on compassionate grounds: he was protecting the umpire responsible for the mistake. "Hand on heart, I didn't want to throw Porky Parker under the bus," he says. Besides, he didn't out-and-out lie: "It wasn't like I was going, 'I swear to god, Dad, I did not nick that.' I would have said" – Langer adopts a nudge-nudge-wink-wink expression – " 'Clicky bat handle, Dad, I reckon.' "

Others remember Langer making the claim with a straight face. Adam Gilchrist has said: "He swore black and blue, even to me out in the middle, that it was a squeaky handle in his bat." In any case, Langer is prepared to concede the high ground. "Look, I might be a liar, and I might be a bad bloke because of it," he says, "but that's how it happened at that moment in my life." I offer that we all make mistakes. "Oh, I don't see that as a mistake," he says. "I don't regret that for one second. I actually now have a good laugh about it."

Justin Langer and Adam Gilchrist in 1999 after securing victory for Australia on day five of the second Test between Australia and Pakistan. Langer had nicked the ball but was given not out.

Justin Langer and Adam Gilchrist in 1999 after securing victory for Australia on day five of the second Test between Australia and Pakistan. Langer had nicked the ball but was given not out.Credit: Getty Images

Langer is not a boastful man but he sees no harm in acknowledging his strengths. "I am a deep thinker, obviously," he says. It occurs to me that he wouldn't need to be Descartes to seem the cerebral type compared with his predecessor, Darren Lehmann. Nicknamed Boof, Lehmann reportedly startled participants in a Cricket Australia high-performance coaching course by topping a list of batting tips with the letters WTBC ("Watch the ball, c…"). But even by normal community standards, Langer is a contemplative individual. As a young player tortured by nerves and self-doubt, he took up transcendental meditation to help himself relax. "I've meditated every single day since," he says. "Twenty minutes every morning."

A keen reader of self-improvement guides and set-your-soul-free manuals (he recommends Zen in the Martial Arts by Joe Hyams), he sprinkles his own books with maxims and homespun philosophy. "The pain of discipline is nothing like the pain of disappointment." And so on. At home in Perth, he has used permanent markers to decorate his den with pearls of wisdom. "It's a 10-metre by five-metre room," he says. "A beautiful room. And it's got quotes and scriptures all over it, like wallpaper." When he noticed the other day that some of the words had faded, he got out the markers and retraced the letters. "It was like therapy."

Langer was raised Catholic and remains devout, though he didn't seriously study the Bible until just before his famous Hobart innings. In an interview with The Record, a Catholic weekly, he confessed he was driven by desperation: in the first Test of that series against Pakistan, he had scored just one run. At Bellerive Oval, a verse from Philippians ran through his head: "All I said every ball for six hours was 'God gives me the strength to achieve anything'. It was like a mantra."

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When Langer became national coach, some hoped he would work miracles. "Everyone was telling me I was the messiah," he says. But in his nine months in charge, Australia has had pretty dismal results in all three formats of the sport, winning only one of six Tests, precious few One Day International (ODI) matches and a paltry number of Twenty20 games (in which each side bats for a maximum 20 overs). The way he sees it, turning things around is going to take time. After Cape Town, Australian cricket was riven by so much recrimination and remorse that it reminded him of a spectacularly dysfunctional family. "And to put a dysfunctional family back together is really hard. There's lots of emotion, there are lots of egos, lots of agendas, lots of angst."

Still, it is painful for an ultra-competitive character like Langer to have such modest success in the field. In his book Australia You Little* Beauty – the cover of which depicts him with an Australian flag draped around his shoulders – he admits that in his playing days his fury at being dismissed sometimes resulted in punched lockers and cracked bats. His friend Simon Katich, the former Australian batsman, says many players reacted angrily when their innings ended: "But he, more so than others, would let rip."

Langer wishes he could report that he had grown more sanguine with age, but the truth is that his mood still depends on the scoreboard. "I've got the best family in the world," he says, referring to his wife, Sue, and their four daughters. "I've got great mates. I've got a few dollars in the bank. I've got all that. But if you lose, you feel miserable. If you win, you don't."

Justin Langer during a training session ahead of the WACA Test in November 2018.

Justin Langer during a training session ahead of the WACA Test in November 2018.Credit: AAP

One morning, I watch the Test team train in the practice nets at Adelaide Oval.

As batsmen and bowlers go through their paces in the warm sunshine, Langer stands with his hands in the pockets of his tracksuit, a cap pulled low on his head. Once in a while, he ambles up to a player and has a quiet word in his ear. Occasionally he shouts encouragement to someone. Test cricketers are surrounded by support staff these days: specialist batting coaches, bowling coaches, physiotherapists, psychologists, dietitians and more. Yet the role of head coach has never been assigned greater importance: Langer gets more screen-time in TV sports bulletins than Test captain Tim Paine, and those in the small crowd gathered around the nets seem at least as interested in him as in the players.

On television, or even from seats in the grandstand, cricket can seem a slow game. Up close, it is ferociously hard and fast. To defend a wicket while a leather-bound ball is fired at you at up to 150 kilometres an hour takes not just skill but considerable courage. Langer is small – 174 centimetres – by cricketers' standards. As a player, he was known for his doughtiness but also for his distressingly frequently failure to get out of the ball's way.

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Making his Test debut against the West Indies in Adelaide in 1993, he was felled by just the second ball bowled to him. In his 100th Test, in Johannesburg in 2006, he was concussed by the first delivery he faced. In between, there were too many tumbles to count. Matthew Hayden, with whom he opened the batting for Australia in more than 100 innings, has written of a visit he and Langer paid to Kerry Packer, the media mogul and World Series Cricket founder. Hayden's favourite part of the evening was when Packer said to Langer: "Son, tell me, why do you get hit on the head so much?"

A check-up after a delivery struck Langer's head in Johannesburg, 2006.

A check-up after a delivery struck Langer's head in Johannesburg, 2006.Credit: Getty Images

Langer was about six when his father, Colin, built a concrete cricket pitch in the family's backyard in outer suburban Perth. Langer practised incessantly, but unlike many of his future Test teammates, was not a schoolboy star. Adam Gilchrist, who played against him in a carnival in 1988, remembers 17-year-old Langer as a "short in stature, really defensive left-handed batsman who could hardly hit the ball off the pitch. He didn't look like the most talented batsman around, I can tell you."

Nevertheless, Langer made it to the Australian Cricket Academy in Adelaide, where his fanatical dedication to training and single-minded determination to play for his country impressed another young player, Kevin Roberts, now Cricket Australia's chief executive. Roberts wasn't at all sure that Langer would make it to the top. "But you had the sense that it was going to be really interesting to follow this guy's path."

As it turned out, Langer received the baggy green cap that goes with membership of the Australian Test team when he was only 22. He was so excited that he wore it to bed. But as Roberts says, Langer "didn't do it easy as a Test player". He kept losing his place in the team, even in the years after the triumphant Hobart innings. On each occasion, he clawed his way back, but the process left him a mass of neuroses. By his own account, he shouted and cried when left out of the first four Tests of an Ashes series in England in 2001. Coach John Buchanan, who shared selection duties with captain Steve Waugh, remembers comments like: "You betrayed me!" And: "You ripped my heart out!"

Reinstated for the fifth and final Test in the series, Langer opened the batting with Matthew Hayden and scored 102 runs before being hit on the helmet and taken to hospital. That innings forged a partnership with Hayden that held firm until Langer's retirement six years later. The two were great friends, but in Hayden's memoir, Standing My Ground, he says he avoided discussing cricket with Langer. His batting partner was just too intense: "If I'd talked to him about my game, it would have sent me bonkers."

Hayden wasn't alone in reacting that way. Malcolm Knox, a columnist with The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age, has noted that "Langer often found himself the only cricketer in bar conversations with journalists, his teammates having evaporated into the night". Even journalists could find him a bit much. According to The Australian's Will Swanton, "you could ask Langer what the baggy green stood for, and half-an-hour later he'd still be talking about running through a brick wall if that's what Steve Waugh wanted him to do".

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Despite this, Langer was liked and respected – so much so that for his final three years in the team he had the honour of leading the victory song (Underneath the Southern Cross I stand/A sprig of wattle in my hand/A native of our native land/Australia, you f…ing beauty!).

Cameron Bancroft was caught on a TV camera during the Cape Town Test hiding something down his pants, ushering in Sandpapergate.

Cameron Bancroft was caught on a TV camera during the Cape Town Test hiding something down his pants, ushering in Sandpapergate.Credit: AP

It was Saturday night and Langer was home on the couch when the image of Cameron Bancroft shoving something down his pants flashed onto his TV screen. Langer, then head coach of West Australian cricket, could scarcely believe his eyes. He knew Bancroft well: he had been helping him develop his game since he was a teenager. "I was devastated for him," he says. "My players, they become like my sons. I care deeply about them."

Langer is on the board of the West Coast Eagles AFL club, and on the Monday morning he was due to visit the construction site of its new headquarters. "I reckon there were 300 Aussie workers there," he says. "They've got their high-vis jackets, their hard hats, their steel-cap boots, and they're all looking at me, going, 'Mate, what has happened?' Then I knew the enormity of it."

For a guy with a boxing kangaroo on his left buttock, the invitation to take over as coach of the Australian side in its hour of greatest need was impossible to refuse. It hadn't come as a surprise. Langer had filled in for Darren Lehmann for an ODI and Twenty20 series during 2016 and 2017, and had long been regarded within Cricket Australia as his natural successor.

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When Lehmann resigned, influential broadcaster Alan Jones lobbied on behalf of Langer, a longtime friend. At his first press conference as coach, Langer conjured up the Anzac spirit, saying Australians were renowned as great fighters: "We look after each other and we look after our mates." A month later, he took his team on a tour of the World War I battlefields of France. "Life-changing experience," he tells me. "We talked about humility and perspective, and understanding how lucky we are." From there, the Australians went to England, where they were beaten in all five games of an ODI series.

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"Things will turn for them," says Belinda Clark, senior Cricket Australia executive and former Australian women's captain. But over the summer, the composition and performance of the men's team have become the subject of raging debate around the country. "If I listened to everyone's opinion at the moment, I would go crazy," says Langer, feeling the pressure of holding the show together. He makes a big effort to maintain his composure while watching the games: "My daughters go, 'Dad, how do you stay so calm?' I go, 'If only you knew, baby. If only you knew.' "

From behind the scenes, I hear reports of sporadic bursts of temper. Langer is said to have told team members at one post-match meeting that he would not want to be in the trenches with them. I hear, too, that during the fourth match of the recent Test series against India, he went into his team's Sydney change-rooms with icepacks on his eyes and asked: "Who am I?" When no one could guess, he said he was Cheteshwar Pujara, the Indian batsman who scored three centuries on his way to winning the player-of-the-series award. "My eyes are sore from watching the ball so hard, like a hawk," he said. Behaviour that seems endearingly quirky if things are going well can look merely flaky if they're not.

When the phrase "elite honesty" appeared on a sign on the wall of the Australian team's change-room before a one-day match against South Africa in Perth last November, reporters asked Langer what it meant. He replied: "It's the Australian way as I know it … You can lie to everyone else but you can't lie to yourself. So that's 'elite honesty' to yourself. And also, the Aussie way I know it is to look a bloke in the eye, look your sister or your mum in the eyes, and tell them the truth and be happy to get some truth back."

Huh? Cricket commentator, coach and former Australian bowler Geoff Lawson, for one, feels none the wiser. "Psychobabble," he says. "It just doesn't mean anything." In a newspaper column headed "Enough nonsense – just play the game", former bowling genius Shane Warne asked impatiently: "What is elite honesty? Does it mean you walk if you nick it?"

Strange things happen on cricket grounds. During a Test match against Sri Lanka in the city of Colombo in 2004, while the Australian team was fielding in sweltering conditions, Warne noticed an object lying on the pitch. It was a bail – one of the two small sticks that balance on three stumps to make a wicket. Captain Ricky Ponting appealed to the umpire, because a dislodged bail is usually cause for a batsman to be dismissed. The appeal was knocked back; a video review showed Langer had flicked the bail off the stumps with his right hand when he walked past the wicket. The action looked deliberate.

Langer stands his ground after nicking the ball to slips against Pakistan in 1999.

Langer stands his ground after nicking the ball to slips against Pakistan in 1999.Credit: Getty Images

"Actually it was the most innocent thing," Langer tells me. Over the years, he had got into the habit of touching the wicket whenever he passed it. "I swear to god I would have done it 10,000 times. It was like a superstition. I'd just touch the top of the bails and walk off." When he saw the video and realised he had knocked off the bail, he was horrified, he says. "I had absolutely no idea." He was charged with misconduct but cleared after convincing the match referee that it had been an honest mistake.

On another day of sizzling heat, this one in Adelaide, I watch people stream through the gates for the start of the first Test against India. A report released late last year by True North Research suggests cricket fans remain deeply disenchanted with the men's Test team, yet the atmosphere in the arena is festive and goodnatured. At least, that's the impression I get through the windows of the airconditioned committee room of the South Australian Cricket Association, where smartly turned-out women and men in dark suits have gathered for a three-course lunch at tables set with starched white cloths and heavy silver cutlery. As well as two state governors (one past, one present) and a brace of Bradmans (cricket's royal family), the guest list includes Tim Worner, chief executive of Seven West Media. In 2018, Worner's company and pay-TV operator Foxtel paid Cricket Australia a record $1.2 billion for TV rights for six years.

Langer on the pitch with Australian Test captain Tim Paine during the second Test against India, in December 2018.

Langer on the pitch with Australian Test captain Tim Paine during the second Test against India, in December 2018.Credit: Getty Images

This is the first Test the Seven network has broadcast under the agreement, and like a kid with his hands on an expensive new toy, Worner is in the mood to celebrate. "He's a good-looking rooster," he says when Australian fast bowler Pat Cummins appears on the screen. "We have the most attractive bowling line-up in the world." I mention that I am doing a story about Langer. "I like him because he's different," Worner says, adding jovially, "Get up him about elite honesty!"

Researching this story, I sometimes find myself leafing through Langer's books, underlining his observations. "A Vegemite sandwich with family and friends is a million times better than crayfish and caviar with strangers," he writes. And: "Talent never loses its voice, but sometimes it is silent." And: "A friend once told me that 'worry is like a rocking chair: you go backwards and forwards and nowhere'." And: "As she entered the room, the hair on the back of my neck stood on end, sending an excited shiver to every cell in my body." That last one is his account of meeting the Queen.

The English magazine The Cricketer recently published an article noting that at his most earnest, Langer had a tendency to sound like David Brent, the character played by Ricky Gervais in the BBC mockumentary series, The Office. To illustrate the point, the magazine supplied 12 quotations, asking readers to guess which were by Langer and which by Brent. The first: "Focus on where you want to go, not where you don't want to go." (Langer.)

Is Langer the right person to coach the Australian cricket team? It depends who you ask. Christina Matthews, chief executive of the Western Australian Cricket Association, argues that he worked wonders in his six years as his home state's head coach. "We hadn't won a tournament of any sort for 10 years," Matthews says. Langer took the Perth Scorchers, a Twenty20 team, to three Big Bash League titles, and the state team, the Western Warriors, to two One-Day Cup wins.

Former Test coach John Buchanan says of Langer: "He is the right person to lead."

Former Test coach John Buchanan says of Langer: "He is the right person to lead."Credit: James Brickwood

Yet, as Geoff Lawson says, Langer could not secure a victory in the Sheffield Shield first-class domestic competition. "Justin doesn't have the credentials for coaching Australia," Lawson says. Former Test coach John Buchanan counters that Langer is principled, dogged and hard-working: "Right at the moment, they're some of the ingredients the Australian cricket team needs. He is the right person to lead." Matthews agrees. "He's already made an impact with the players," she says. "You can see it in their demeanour. We're not really seeing it in the way they play yet, but they'll get there."

Langer, too, is optimistic. "One of our values is learning, elite learning," he says. By which he means that in cricket, as in life, each new dawn is an opportunity. "As long as you wake up every day looking to get better, well, you can get better."

To read more from Good Weekend magazine, visit our page at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and Brisbane Times.

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