Bracewell put to the test

ADELAIDE - John Bracewell is not a big fan of psycho-analysis. But what price would you have paid for a round-trip through his mind as his charges folded - first in Brisbane, then giving up the initiative before lunch on the first day of this test?

Here was a guy who in his playing career, you suspect, would rather watch one of his brothers being eaten alive than give any ground to the Australians. Here he was forced to view his team capitulate at the merest hint of pressure. How must he have felt when Scott Styris, in the last over before lunch on that fateful fourth day at the Gabba, effectively signalled New Zealand's surrender by padding up to a straight one from Shane Warne?

"It's a bat, not a f*****g ornament, so use it," came the call from a heckler, who may have unwittingly mirrored the coach's thoughts. How must he have felt when Craig McMillan took the fight to the Australians with his mouth but omitted to use any of his once-considerable batting skills?

Actually, what he thought became obvious at 6pm on Thursday when, despite being routed for 76 at Brisbane, Bracewell omitted McMillan, from the Adelaide team.

Bracewell is a straightforward type of bloke, a pie and a pint rather than wine and cheese. He talks straight, walks (reasonably) straight, but it is only when it comes to picking a team that the synapses go crooked.

Mathew Sinclair, Hamish Marshall, James Franklin, Chris Martin and McMillan have all, at some point, fallen victim to the vagaries of Bracewell's selection policy. It is here that Bracewell appears to think too much. Sometimes you've just got to pick your best XI and let them go for it. He led a Trojan horse on to the field in Brisbane but the only shock that jumped out was Kyle Mills.

Bracewell's justification was that Australia was vulnerable early to swing bowling. Mills is a handy and whole-hearted cricketer but even Bracewell must have realised he was drawing a long bow if he felt the military medium pace of Mills could expose the "vulnerabilities" of Australia.

Instead, with New Zealand's fastest bowler sitting in the stands as the game took place on a fast and bouncy track, it just looked like a massive blunder. Indeed, the coach's treatment of Ian Butler looks like a case of tough love gone wrong. Bracewell played in an era where, for the early part of his career, spin was seen as useful only in a washing machine. He knows more acutely than most the pain of missing selection when you feel you should be playing.

So for him to be as dismissive about Butler as he was following the first test, "what, so we could bowl even shorter", seemed unnecessarily harsh.

But, going back to the beginning, it is difficult to read Bracewell's thoughts during a game because he rarely speaks.

It was once an unwritten rule that the coach would front up to the press conference at the end of Saturday's play for the benefit of the readers of the national papers. Now, due to unnecessarily restrictive protocols, it is effectively a written rule that he doesn't.

Journalists are left scrabbling over the usual, carefully scripted player-generated platitudes but, more importantly, readers are denied the opportunity to gauge how Bracewell sees events.

Again this is a shame because Bracewell remains an enlightened observer.

The best performance by a New Zealander on this tour remains Bracewell's pre-test impromptu conference at the Gabba. He led the gathered throng down the veritable garden path with a set of statistics that, though later proven to be palpably wrong, had everyone wondering whether he had found a giant chink in Australia's seemingly impenetrable armour.

If tests involving Australia, he said, are over before the fifth day, they win 100 per cent of them. If they go to the fifth day, he continued, that figure is only 33 per cent.

"What does that tell you about the way Australia plays?" asked a reporter. "Nothing," deadpanned Bracewell, "it's just a statistic."

When told that Greg Chappell had offered his cricket consultancy services for free, Bracewell said he hadn't read the papers and even if he had, he "didn't believe everything he read in them anyway".

When told that Darren Lehmann thought the New Zealanders might play with too much fear against Australia, he questioned Lehmann's psychology qualifications, though mentioned it was nice he was thinking of a career after cricket.

But help is what Bracewell clearly needs, even if he is the last person to go asking for it.

He favours an approach where expertise is brought in from outside the management unit and maybe what Bracewell needs this home summer is a 'no' man.

This would need to be someone with the strength of character to say no to some of the forceful Bracewell's more fanciful ideas and let him get on with the job of coaching.

That's something nobody doubts he has the credentials to do.

- HERALD ON SUNDAY