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“He’s no-nonsense without being confrontational. If he sees incompetency around him, he will quietly call it out”

Shashank Kishore19-Oct-2022The new set of BCCI office-bearers was finalised over a week ago. Yet, when Roger Binny was officially announced as the BCCI’s 36th president at the Annual General Meeting in Mumbai on Tuesday, there was an unmistakable buzz at the Karnataka State Cricket Association (KSCA) in Bengaluru where he had been president for the past three years.Among those celebrating the rise of one of their own to the highest office in the BCCI was Sanjay Desai, Binny’s close friend and a veteran KSCA administrator himself. Desai and Binny were once Karnataka team-mates who starred in an unbroken 451-run opening stand in the Ranji Trophy against Kerala in 1977-78. Desai has had a ringside view of the several roles Binny has donned – as player, coach, selector and administrator.”He [Binny] will follow the rule book to a tee,” Desai says. “He doesn’t like the limelight, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for him being silent. He will do his job quietly, without much fuss. He’s no-nonsense in a way, without being confrontational. If he sees incompetency around him, he will quietly call it out. As a person, his stature has never been a stumbling block when it comes to establishing two-way communication with the players, stakeholders or his own colleagues.”Related

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After his retirement as a cricketer, Binny, a 1983 World Cup winner, first forayed into coaching when he was in charge of the India Under-19s. In 2000, he coached the Mohammad Kaif-led team to the Under-19 World Cup win in Sri Lanka. Two years later, he went into the grassroots to coach the Under-16s and played a key role in the emergence of young players such as Ambati Rayudu, Robin Uthappa and Irfan Pathan.After his first coaching stint, Binny helped established pathways for cricket in South-East Asia and the Middle East as a cricket development officer of the Asian Cricket Council (ACC).”When I joined the ACC in 2007, Roger was already many years my senior, but not for once did he make it seem that he was a senior and my views didn’t matter,” says former Bangladesh captain Aminul Islam, who currently heads the ICC’s pathway programs in Asia. “It was never ‘I am Roger Binny, I’m a World Cup winner, I know what to do’. He would always hear people out. He would gladly accept counterviews. It was never ‘my way or the highway’.”His challenge was to set up administrative pathways and coaching pathways from scratch. For someone to build this across several countries, there are lots of bureaucratic hurdles to pass. You need to have immense patience. Roger’s handling of all of this was exemplary. He was an example for us to follow.”

“He doesn’t like the limelight, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for him being silent. He will do his job quietly, without much fuss. He’s no-nonsense in a way, without being confrontational. If he sees incompetency around him, he will quietly call it out”Sanjay Desai

Reetinder Sodhi, the vice-captain of India’s U-19 World Cup-winning team in 2000 and currently a BCCI match referee, points to Binny’s empowering the players to make decisions and be accountable for them made them better cricketers when they graduated to the senior levels.”He was a chilled-out coach, you would never see him angry or flustered,” Sodhi says. “In situations where one could lose their mind, he would resonate calmness. Unless absolutely necessary, he wouldn’t interfere with on-field decisions. For us at the U-19 level, that was massive because until then, we were always under the coach’s eyes and ears. Roger wasn’t the one to spoon-feed you as kids, he treated us like mature individuals for whom he was always around whenever required.”Others point to Binny being polite, yet assertive. “If Roger said no, no one would really go back and ask him to reconsider, because he isn’t an impulsive person. If he says no to something, you know he would’ve spent considerable time thinking about it before arriving at a decision,” says a KSCA administrator.Sodhi too cites an instance from that U-19 World Cup campaign to highlight this. “Before our group game against Sri Lanka, I was very unwell. I turned up sick on the morning of the match and didn’t know how to inform Roger that I won’t be in a position to take the field. I hadn’t slept the whole night and woke up with a high temperature.”I walked down the stairs to the ground and told him that I was feeling weak. Roger smiled, took one hard look at me and in the gentlest manner and said, ‘Sodhi, you’re playing. Please take rest now and be ready five minutes before the game.’ I made 74 and got two wickets and was named Player of the Match. If he hadn’t fired me up to play, I may have been on the sickbed probably for even two or three days after the match.”Binny’s expert handling of disputes as an administrator is perhaps another underrated facet to his man-management skills. In 2010, he was named vice president under Anil Kumble’s administration at the KSCA at a time when two different factions were at loggerheads, resulting in an acrimonious election.Roger Binny with Yashpal Sharma, Sunil Gavaskar and Syed Kirmani at a reunion of India’s 1983 World Cup-winning squad at Lord’s in 2018•Associated PressIn the aftermath, Binny is believed to have been among the key mediators in ensuring things didn’t take an ugly turn. Later, Binny would also find support from the rival Brijesh Patel camp. Incidentally, Patel has held a stranglehold over KSCA for a long time, and his backing was one of the catalysts in Binny’s elevation to the top job in the BCCI.Outside of administration, Binny was also a national selector between 2012 and 2016. In 2014, he had a conflict-of-interest cloud hovering over him when his son Stuart Binny was spoken of as a potential all-round option for the national team. Selectors at the time credit Binny for not making things awkward as he would recuse himself whenever Stuart’s name was up for selection.Binny’s most recent administrative tenure was at the KSCA, where among his first tasks was to restore credibility to the state’s T20 League, Karnataka Premier League, following arrests of certain players and team owners for match-fixing in 2019. Binny swiftly disbanded the tournament and overhauled the structure. He ensured his administration took over complete control of ownership of teams and player payments. Among cricketing decisions, Binny has increasingly advocated for different teams across different formats for Karnataka, something the selectors appeared to have aligned towards when they picked the squad for the ongoing Syed Mushtaq Ali Trophy.Off the field, Binny is a doting grandfather who loves spending family time at his farm in Bandipur, away from the chaos and traffic of Bengaluru. He is passionate about golf and wildlife conservation. Last week, soon after returning to Bengaluru after filling his nomination for the BCCI presidency, he made a dash to his farm to ensure everything was in order for his pets and rescue dogs.In accepting the top job that could potentially see him away from his farm for a lot longer than he is accustomed to, Binny has signalled the start of the next phase in his administrative career.

His recent changes have shown his hunger to get better even though he was still scoring consistently

Alex Malcolm01-Dec-2022″I’m back, baby!” That was Steven Smith’s declaration after one cover drive during his unbeaten 80 in the first ODI against England in Adelaide a fortnight ago.He’s back alright. Back in a big way as he helped himself to an unbeaten double century against a hapless West Indies attack.”I think from the first one-dayer against England, where I sort of implemented the work that I’ve been doing, it felt really good straightaway,” Smith said following his 200 not out in Perth. “I was able to obviously spend a bit of time in the middle in those games and I’ve just taken that same form or same feeling into this Test match.”This was far from his greatest innings given the standard of bowling he was facing. It is his second in as many Test matches after breaking an 18-month drought in Galle in July. But it was one of his smoothest and most fluent and his first since he’s been able to bed down the changes he started making in Sri Lanka. He himself has proclaimed he is batting the best he has for six years, which has raised some eyebrows among his team-mates given the near-unparalleled heights that he hit in the 2019 Ashes.Related

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“He averaged 110 in a series in 2019 where I think the conditions were tough, it was nipping around and he made batting look ridiculously easy,” Marnus Labuschagne said on Wednesday night. “From an onlooker that’s the best I’ve seen him bat. But in terms of feel, he would say that looked ugly. That’s just the open stance, playing the nipping ball, being a bit more front-on, that’s what he felt was right for that time. But he averaged 110 or something for the series, so I don’t really think it matters how Steve Smith bats, he’s going to find a way to score runs.”In terms of look and feel, this was anything but ugly. It’s significant that perhaps his most dominant innings since that 2019 Ashes would come in Perth. It was here in late 2019 that New Zealand, mainly through Neil Wagner, found a method to negate Smith’s Bradman-esque run of scoring.”I probably didn’t notice it straight away,” Smith said of Wagner’s tactics becoming his kryptonite. “I’ve only noticed it in the last probably six to 12 months. But I wanted to get back to how I was probably batting in 2013-14. I was a lot more side on there.

Whilst I was still contributing to the team, I wasn’t probably getting the big runs that I’d like to get

“I was pulling balls in front of square like I was out there in this innings and I think when I’m doing that I’m getting myself into good positions. I felt as though for a few years there my [bottom] hand was so far round the bat, closed, and I was getting front on with the chest, which all I could do was really help them on their way behind square rather than use power in front of square. That’s essentially it. I’m certainly in much better positions.”In Perth, he equaled Sir Donald Bradman’s tally of 29 Test centuries looking like a different player. He’s spoken previously about how he has changed his starting point, his trigger movement and his body angle at the crease.But on top of giving him more scoring options, his scoring rate is recalibrating back to the level that made him the world’s most prolific Test batter.Between the 2019 Ashes and the tour of Sri Lanka he struck at 42.55 in Test cricket, compared to his career strike-rate of 54.07. He was still facing enough balls to be scoring heavily, but his open stance, open chest, exaggerated back and across technique and closed bat face was shutting off his scoring zones in front of the wicket through both the off and the on side to the point where he faced more than 200 balls four times but reached three figures just once. Run-scoring had become painstaking work for him. He wasn’t failing, but he wasn’t converting at his normal rate.Steve Smith finding his hands led to some sumptuous drives•Cricket Australia/Getty ImagesIn Perth, West Indies simply could not contain him. He moved swiftly to 50 in 74 balls on the opening day. He actually slowed down on day two, in part because of having to restart his innings, but also because West Indies bowled better areas. But he cruised to a century in 180 balls, with only 10 boundaries. He strolled to his double-century in 311 balls.”I suppose the reason for my slight change in technique is because I was unhappy with where I was at with my batting,” Smith said. “Whilst I was still contributing to the team, I wasn’t probably getting the big runs that I’d like to get.”But I think now with the way I’m able to play and the way teams have bowled against me, I’ve had to adapt a bit and where I’m at with my body and my hands I feel like I’m opening up the whole ground as opposed to probably just behind square on the leg side, and I’m able to hit the ball in different areas, which I probably was able to hit previously. So I feel in a good place.”He now sits fourth on Australia’s all-time list of century-makers alongside Bradman. He is one behind Matthew Hayden and three shy of Steve Waugh. There’s every chance he could knock them off by the end of this summer. But he was less confident about Ricky Ponting’s record of 41 Test centuries for Australia.”That’s a long way away, I’m not sure,” Smith said. “I’m 33, 34 next year. Not sure how long I’ll play for. But we’ll see, 41 is certainly a long way away. There are a lot of Test matches I guess in the next year for us so we’ll see how many I can get. Hopefully, I can get a few more in that period of time. We’ll go from there.”

The RCB batter acknowledged the challenge of switching between formats after scoring a match-winning hundred against Sunrisers

Karthik Krishnaswamy18-May-20231:48

Moody: ‘The way Kohli batted, he reminded me of the 2016 season’

The range of shots on display in T20 cricket has never been wider, but Virat Kohli continues to bat like Virat Kohli. He isn’t a 360-degree player, and he doesn’t try to be one, and this, he says, is because he has to juggle the wildly differing demands of cricket’s three formats as an all-year-round player.Kohli said this after scoring a match-winning 100 off 63 balls for Royal Challengers Bangalore against Sunrisers Hyderabad on Thursday night. Soon after Kohli completes his IPL season with RCB, he will travel to the UK to play for India against Australia in the World Test Championship final.”I’ve never been a guy who tries so many fancy shots, because we have to play 12 months of the year,” he said. “For me, it’s not [about] playing fancy shots and throwing my wicket away. We’ve got Test cricket after the IPL, so I’ve got to stay true to my technique and find ways to win games for my team, something that I take a lot of pride in, and when I can make an impact in an important game, obviously that gives me confidence, gives the team confidence, and it just helps the team overall, which is something that I look to do.”Related

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It’s a significant statement, because it isn’t often that someone as high-profile as Kohli acknowledges – even indirectly – that trying to play in a T20-specific way during a T20 competition could affect a batter’s ability to handle the demands of Test cricket.In a way, Kohli may have been responding to the criticism he often faces for how he bats in T20. Whether he is playing for India or RCB, he is never been too far from having his approach questioned – click here, here and here for three of many examples from just this website.You could argue that there is merit to these critiques of Kohli and other batters who broadly fall under the anchor category in T20s. From the evidence of IPL 2023 alone, where teams have scored quicker than ever and passed 200 more often than in any other previous season, the anchor appears to be an endangered commodity in T20 teams. They have had to find ways to score quicker to stay relevant, and Kohli has tried to do this too, particularly by adopting a higher-risk approach against pace to try and make up for his slower scoring against spin.But these critiques of Kohli and other players of his kind often address the issue in isolation, without examining how trying to bat more explosively in T20 could hamper a batter’s ability to play long innings in Test or even ODI cricket.’I’ve never been a guy who tries so many fancy shots, because we have to play 12 months of the year’•BCCIBy drawing such a close relationship between “playing fancy shots” and “throwing my wicket away”, Kohli got to the heart of the issue. Batters need to put a price on their wicket in the longer formats; the best T20 hitters are those who unlearn that maxim. They “destigmatise risk”, as the former New Zealand captain Daniel Vettori put it while encouraging KL Rahul – another batter who has faced heavy criticism for his T20 approach – to take more chances early on.It can’t be easy to destigmatise risk in a T20 tournament and play a high-profile Test series immediately afterwards, though, and Kohli seemed to acknowledge this when he spoke about staying true to his technique.Plenty of batters have developed T20-specific techniques to meet the format’s demand for frequent fours and sixes. The former Australia allrounder Shane Watson, for instance, developed one that incorporated baseball principles.To switch between a T20-specific technique and a Test-match technique that prioritises survival cannot be easy, particularly when there is no real gap between tournaments and series. For this reason, as T20 continues its rapid evolution, the all-format batter could one day become a rarity.Kohli, for now, continues to score hundreds in the IPL without – as he put it – compromising on his technique. Thursday night’s innings against Sunrisers was his seventh T20 hundred and his sixth in the IPL, and after the game was done he allowed himself a brief moment of soaking in how it felt.”It’s my sixth IPL hundred, and I don’t give myself enough credit for that sometimes, because I put myself under so much stress already,” he said. “I don’t really care about what anyone says on the outside, to be honest, because that’s their opinion. When you’re in that situation yourself, you know how to win games of cricket, and I’ve done that for a long period of time, so it’s not like when I play I don’t win games for my team. It’s playing the situation that I take pride in.”

Having been out of action for 18 months, the quick wants to take a leaf out of Pat Cummins’ book as she gets back to competitive cricket

Valkerie Baynes25-Jun-2023There was a time when just walking 200 metres to grab a coffee without needing crutches or a lift home in the car was the biggest achievement in Tayla Vlaeminck’s bid to play for Australia again.Vlaeminck was one of the fastest bowlers in the women’s game before suffering a recurrence of a stress fracture in the navicular bone of her foot, which kept her out of two T20 World Cups either side of the ODI edition in 2022. She made the last of her 24 appearances for Australia during the 2022 Women’s Ashes, 18 months to the day before she played for Australia A last Wednesday as part of their T20 series against England A running alongside the current Women’s Ashes Test. Vlaeminck picked up the wicket of opener Bryony Smith as England A won by 74 runs at Loughborough.”It was so much fun getting out there,” Vlaeminck said at Trent Bridge after stopping by to see her senior team-mates locked in battle with England. “It’s been a while in the making… it was an lbw and I almost lost my voice I shouted that loudly. I don’t know that the umpire had a choice, to be honest. The girls got around me and I suppose it makes it all worth it in those nice moments.”Related

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Making it all worth seemed a long way off, even when she progressed from that short coffee errand to a ten-minute walk listening to a podcast. Or when she spent four months working with the Australian Ballet, just a stone’s throw from the MCG which Vlaeminck credits with playing a crucial role in helping her back to cricket.”It’s one of the key reasons I’m back,” she said. “It was awesome because building calf strengthening stuff is literally their gym, so for me to go in there not talk cricket, not even have to talk to people about where I’m at or even see it at all, it was really refreshing. It took away the fact that I was doing rehab and just felt like I was training with another person. I walked in first day and some of the stuff I was like, ‘oh, this will be so easy,’ and I’d get two reps in and I’d be sweating and shaking. They were incredible. They just let me come in whenever I wanted, they dropped everything for me basically, so I definitely wouldn’t be back playing without them.”Vlaeminck has also worked closely with Cricket Australia and Cricket Victoria, remodelling her action to try and prevent a recurrence of the injury.Tayla Vlaeminck suffered a recurrence of a stress fracture in the navicular bone of her foot•Getty Images”I’ve made a few technical changes that we identified as probably a reason why my foot kept going on me,” she said. “That took a while to get the hang of. I was probably in the indoor nets at Junction [Oval] for maybe three or four months, just literally walking to the crease, and relearning that pattern I’d done for so long.”I still feel like I’ve only probably bowled at 100% a handful of times. And going into a game is completely different to the nets, so I think it’ll take me a little bit. But everyone’s been so supportive of me, no one is forcing me or putting pressure on me to perform straight away, so I feel like I’ve got a bit of freedom and a bit of time to get back into it.”It was just some feet alignment stuff. My arms and legs kind of go everywhere when I bowl so I was going into some real weird positions which my body obviously couldn’t handle. I was just trying to straighten a few things up and just make my action a bit more efficient and hopefully that’ll keep me on the field longer this time.”

“I’m a shocker for if I get the ball in my hand in the nets it was like, 120% or nothing. The last 18 months have been a steep learning curve, I actually just can’t do that if I want to play cricket and play regularly.”Tayla Vlaeminck

Vlaeminck also needed to change her attitude towards training. While her all-or-nothing approach was laudable in an elite athlete, it’s unsustainable for a body that has also endured two knee reconstructions, a dislocated shoulder and a partial anterior cruciate ligament strain.”I won’t go crazy on the games and just have some more rest time and more games off,” Vlaeminck explained. “We’ve changed my training a little bit as well, less intense overs at training. I’m a shocker for if I get the ball in my hand in the nets it was like, 120% or nothing. The last 18 months have been a steep learning curve, I actually just can’t do that if I want to play cricket and play regularly. So just those little things – making sure I keep them going now that I’m actually back playing is going to be hard but something that I’ll have to get my head around.”She sat out the second T20, which England A won by five wickets but was expected to feature again in Sunday’s series decider as her comeback is carefully managed. But the Test being played simultaneously remains a good way down the comeback trail, with the 24-year-old Vlaeminck saying, “If I could get a T20 game for Australia, if I could even get back in the squad, that’d be incredible”.There are precedents for such a revival, however, if Vlaeminck wants to add to her one Test appearance, in the 2019 Ashes. Australia men’s captain Pat Cummins was a gifted teenager with a fierce bouncer who had to overcome heel and back stress fractures to go on and play 51 Tests and counting.Tayla Vlaeminck has vowed to go a bit easy during her training sessions•Getty Images”I see what he’s done and I think that’s pretty cool,” Vlaeminck said. “And the same thing happens to a lot of young athletes in lots of sports, right? People come in, they have two or three years where they just get one thing after the other and then all of a sudden something happens and you’re fine. It’s cool to be able to see that and see that other people have found a way out but I suppose when you’re actually in it, it doesn’t necessarily always feel like that’s going to be the case.”While what Pat’s done is incredible and hopefully I can do the same thing, I’m also not Patty and so it’s hard to be able to be like, ‘I’ll be sweet from now on and I’ll play 50 Tests’. But it does give you that little growing sense that once you start to mature in your body a bit more your bones hopefully harden up a little bit then yeah, but there’s a lot of cricket to go.”Such is Cricket Australia’s faith in Vlaeminck’s talent and potential that they renewed her national contract with no expectations attached as to when she would play for her country again.Shawn Flegler, Cricket Australia’s Female High Performance and Talent Manager, described Vlaeminck’s return in the Australia A game as a “massive relief” especially as her injury was such a rare one, giving medical and coaching staff little by way of a blueprint for her rehabilitation programme.”There’s not many in the world who bowl 120-plus,” Flegler says. “You have to be patient, you always have to be with fast bowlers, but even more so with those who bowl 120-plus. We made that commitment a couple of years ago. She has something special, let’s hang in there. I know she is really grateful for it, but she is the type of person you want to see do well because she is committed to being the best she can be, on and off the pitch. I have no regrets about offering her a contract.”The good thing now is she understands she doesn’t have to bowl at 100% all the time. When she used to train, it was 100% from ball one in training, 100% in the game. Now she is learning how to control that a bit. Being 90% is good enough to get wickets and at training being at 70%, you can still improve your action. And then you can still go to 100% now and then. It’s just her understanding, being a fast bowler and learning her craft. I think she will get back to 100% again.”

Steven Smith has the highest batting average for anyone who has played 99 Tests

Varun Shetty and Shiva Jayaraman05-Jul-2023If the visualisation does not appear, disable your ad-blocker and click here to reload the page.

Have defending champions hit rock bottom at this tournament?

Andrew Fidel Fernando04-Nov-20232:00

Buttler: ‘Incredibly frustrating but it doesn’t shake your belief’

At some point it just makes you sad. Sad to watch. Sad to be around. Sad to go to press conferences, and ask sad questions of sad players who collectively bear the kinds of mopey expressions that rows of dogs in rescue shelters do.”Oh no, this one’s been treated really badly. Beaten by almost everyone they’ve met almost everywhere they’ve traveled? How awful.”Only two points on the table after seven matches and a net run rate of negative 1.504? That’s really ruining this metaphor. But buddy, that’s some serious misery.”Related

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There were days when England crashing out of tournaments was at least comical. In their 2011 World Cup quarter-final, TM Dilshan apologised to Upul Tharanga for hitting a four, because Sri Lanka’s openers only had so many of the 230-run target left to get, more than 10 overs to get them in, and Tharanga hadn’t got to a hundred yet. But then that England had also done things like tie a 338-runs-a-side game against eventual champions India, earlier in the tournament, which had set up the punchline.In Wellington in 2015, New Zealand chasing their 123 down inside 13 overs was an absurdist humour masterclass for the totality of that evisceration.At the start of this campaign, there was schadenfreude about their unraveling in India too. They’d been so allergic to non-attacking words, their captain refused to call it a World Cup defence. (Would they have preferred “Smashing the ever-living daylights out of their title”?)But many of these are the same guys who won in 2019, won in the shortest format in 2022, were just months ago talking about saving Test cricket, and now would struggle to save a funny meme on their phone, such is the overall level of incompetence and aversion to any shred of joy in this campaign.The usual things to say at this stage is that a team looks defeated, appear to be husks of themselves, have nothing left to give, are mentally down. But to see a once-great team in this state somehow feels even worse as well as ridiculous, like a team of men in their mid 30s have all received calls from their parents to let them know they’re being put up for adoption.In reality, there was fight from them against Australia, and portions of the game which they genuinely won. David Warner has carved up this World Cup, in the ODI form of his life, but Chris Woakes bowled an excellent off-pace delivery to have him top edge one high into the air, not long after he’d also dismissed Travis Head, who’d hit 109 off 67 balls in his last match.As late as the 35th over, when Ben Stokes had started to find his range, England still had six wickets and a hope. At the time, Adil Rashid’s late boundaries did not seem totally futile either.But seen in the context of this sewage avalanche of a campaign, even these moments of strength begin to feel like a wallowing in misery. Then their captain, Jos Buttler, comes out after the game and says things like:”We only lost by 30.””We threatened, but we’re still not good enough.””Yeah, frustrated. Yeah, disappointed. Yeah… all of the above.”Ben Stokes’ expression says it all•ICC via Getty ImagesThere have not been stories of personal triumph either. England do not have a batter among the top dozen runscorers in this tournament, or a bowler in the top dozen wicket-takers.They are now the man at the party who rocked up with a keg of beer and almost as much confidence, but through the course of the evening has unraveled and is weeping loudly for all to hear on the couch. They deserve the dignity of a taxi home, a friend holding them as they stagger through their door, some help getting out of the trousers in which they have lavishly peed themselves, and then a long, kind blackout. These, after all, are even now world champions.But they have two more rounds of this World Cup left, and a Champions Trophy in 2025 to qualify for, though many of these players may not actually make it another two years in ODI cricket. Their morose expedition hits Pune next, for a match against Netherlands, who have players in their team who would be giddy if they got a county contract.Surely England can find something of themselves there. But then every time they’ve thought they’d hit rock bottom, there was quicksand, a bog, a toilet hole that some campers had dug three days ago.

He hopes to carry his learnings from Lisa Keightley and Ricky Ponting into a ‘well-balanced team’

Alex Malcolm18-Feb-2024Michael Klinger wore many hats during his playing days as a highly dependable, ultra-consistent runscorer for the innumerable states, counties and franchises he represented.In his post-playing days, he is wearing even more. He is currently the head of men’s T20 for Cricket New South Wales, overseeing the cricket programs of the two Sydney BBL clubs as well as Washington Freedom in Major League Cricket, where he just pulled off a major coup in signing Ricky Ponting as the new head coach.In his spare time, he took up a role as batting coach for Sydney Thunder’s WBBL side. And now he will be the head coach of Gujarat Giants in the WPL after Rachael Haynes’ resignation, having only signed to be batting coach just recently.Related

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• Klinger replaces Haynes as Gujarat Giants head coach at WPL

• Ponting confirmed as Washington Freedom head coach in Major League Cricket

“It may seem like a lot of hats but it fits in perfectly well into a 12-month schedule,” Klinger told ESPNcricinfo. “I’m really enjoying it, doing mainly the administration role but doing a little bit of coaching has invigorated me to some extent and I’ve really enjoyed it. I hadn’t worked in women’s cricket up until October last year and really enjoyed it and feel that I can really help whether it’s the Thunder or the Gujarat Giants going forward as well.”Klinger has had head coaching experience before, having coached Melbourne Renegades in the men’s BBL for two seasons between 2019 and 2021 before taking up his role with Cricket New South Wales. It wasn’t an easy experience with Renegades winning just seven games across two seasons having come into the role cold with no real coaching experience behind him.But he has learned some valuable lessons from that experience, and his work as an administrator in cricket high performance has given him a different lens on coaching. He has worked with one of Australia’s most experienced coaches in Greg Shipperd at Sydney Sixers, NSW and Washington Freedom in setting up all aspects of a cricket program. Then working under the experienced Lisa Keightley recently at Sydney Thunder in the WBBL as a batting coach added another layer to his experience.”Lisa Keightley was very good at building relationships with the players,” Klinger said.”Certainly, on the back in my role with the Renegades and even just speaking to Ricky [Ponting] over the last four to six weeks around coaching I think is going to be invaluable for me going into this role as well.”I’m hugely thankful to Rachael Haynes as well. I think without her asking me to come into the batting coach role, none of this would have ever happened. So thankful for her for introducing me into this franchise, originally as a batting coach, and then now obviously the opportunity as a coach.”Klinger does know what a winning team looks like. He won five T20 titles as a player, three in the state-based Big Bash competition with Victoria and South Australia and then two BBL titles with Perth Scorchers under Justin Langer.What he knows is the importance of getting the most out of your entire squad. Giants struggled last year on the back of Beth Mooney’s injury early in the tournament. The return of Mooney and the addition of Phoebe Litchfield add plenty of batting firepower alongside Ashleigh Gardner and Laura Wolvaardt. Klinger worked with Litchfield during the WBBL last year.”Phoebe Litchfield is already a star but could be the best player in the world in a very short period of time, I think,” Klinger said.”I think there’s a pretty well-balanced team.”You need your big players to be playing well. But you also need a lot of your depth players to be contributing and winning a couple of games for you during the tournament. It’s an eight-game tournament, you probably need to win at least four to get into the finals. So that’s probably our first aim, is to qualify for the finals and then and then go from there.”