Over the coming days, when Australia's selection panel sits down to finalise the squad for their opening Ashes encounter in Brisbane, at some point during the conversation, Darren Lehmann will have to excuse himself from the room. If the name of his son, Jake Lehmann, comes up - and it almost certainly will, even as an outside choice - then senior Lehmann will leave the other selectors to deliberate without him.
While this process will be the result of a formal Cricket Australia Board directive to avoid conflicts of interest, it seems Darren Lehmann actively prefers not to be involved. "I'd be that nervous anyway I probably wouldn't be coach, I'd probably go to the bar," he said when the subject arose last year. Should Jake put on another good showing in this week's Sheffield Shield, the old man might have to come up with a coping strategy by the time Australia and England step out at the Gabba on November 23.
One former Ashes combatant who knows a fair bit about the father-son, coach-player dynamic, albeit from the English perspective, is Alec Stewart. England's second-most capped Test cricketer, Stewart began his international career in 1989, at a time when his dad, Micky, was manager of the team. Fortunately, they already had a well-established method for making the relationship work.
"When I signed professionally at Surrey as a 17-year-old, he was manager of the Surrey side then," Alec told ESPNcricinfo. "We'd obviously spoken about it, when I left school he knew I wanted to try and play cricket. He was only ever going to sign me if he felt I was good enough - he almost took the surname or the relationship out of the question, he just looked at me as a cricketer.
"That's what we made very, very clear. When we were at home, he's obviously me dad but when we were at cricket - or work, because that's what it was - then I didn't have a dad who was the coach and he didn't have a son who was a player. I was a player and he was very much coach, or manager. I never called him or referred to him as 'dad' when I was at work. Once we got home, or at a family occasion, he's dad and still is. But when we're at work it's very much a player-coach relationship."
Whether with Surrey or England, Micky was always "gur" (short for manager) to Alec, just as he was to everyone else. Although, he adds: "I might have called him a few other names under me breath if he dropped me."
No comments:
Post a Comment