The best coaches give their players space in which to succeed (page 1 of 2)

"I'm a big believer that the coach is something you travel in to get to and from the game!" he replied with characteristic irreverence. One suspects that Australian coach John Buchanan won't have been too bothered about Warney's levity. Warne is the coach's dream player in many ways combining technical brilliance with unlimited self-confidence - the coach's role was just to wind him up and let him go.

A confident team will outperform one that is tightly supervised

Many years ago, in a former life, I was a sales manager supervising a team of salesmen in Scotland. The flavour of the time was hands on coaching of sales rep's selling skills - all process, technique and structure. My predecessor in the job ran through with me the strengths and weaknesses of my team and told me how I should coach them to improve their performance. When I took over I found that not only did all of the team know far more about selling than I did, but that what they really wanted was not the dead hand of a coach on their shoulders, but respect for their skills and hands-on support from me when they really needed it, which wasn't often. This revelation suited my slothful style anyway so it was easy to give them the authority to make their own decisions - to wind them up and let them go. It worked for me as it worked for Buchanan with Warne.

The coach's role is more motivational than technical

An international team in any sport should comprise players with exceptional technical abilities - if they have glaring defects they shouldn't be there. True their may be the odd part of their game where a very experienced coach can spot a technical defect, but in the main the coach's role is not technical at all - it is motivational. And yet how often do you see a coach intently studying recorded footage of a player trying too find that part of his technique that needs correcting? Even a genius like Shane Warne had his mentor - he talked from time to time to Terry Jenner a fellow Australian wrist spinner and now a coach. But I suspect that this was really a fine-tuning exercise for Warne and that Jenner's role was really to reassure him about his unique powers, not to try and teach him new tricks.

Sven-Göran Eriksson was recruited by the English "Football Association" because of his "astute tactical awareness" (or so they said at the time). Well we all know where this got England and his highly talented England players in successive international tournaments. Nowhere. Contrast Eriksson's approach with that of the best manager that England never had - Brian Clough. Cloughie said "Players lose you games, not tactics. There's so much crap talked about tactics by people who barely know how to win at dominoes." Paul Bryant the US Football coach put it in similar terms: "No coach has ever won a game by what he knows; it's what his players know that counts."

Captain/coach relations are crucial can be crucial

A football manager who inspires and motivates his players working with a Captain who the team respects is the ideal combination. Brian Clough chose his captains well - to complement rather than fight against his unique style of leadership. In cricket the captain's role is much more hands on - it is he, not the coach, who makes the on field decisions. A cricket team in the field is not a video game that the coach can remotely control from the dressing room. This is one of the reasons that England were so excellent in 2005 when Duncan Fletcher, the coach, and Michael Vaughan, the captain, complemented each other perfectly.