KEY POINTS:
The 2007 cricket year will always be remembered for the debacle over how Bob Woolmer died, but an equally fascinating subject is to consider how he made a living.
Specifically, what do national team cricket coaches do and does anybody really need them?
It's time for high level help at this point in the column, because a bit of name dropping never goes amiss when you are about to propose anything too far outside the square.
No less a character than the renowned former Australian captain Ian Chappell, for one, doubts the need for national team coaches.
Chappell's views surfaced again during the spat between Shane Warne and John Buchanan, the recently departed Australian coach.
Warne has called Buchanan a "goose" who spouted "verbal diarrhoea' during his nine year stint as Australia's coach. Chappell, a Warne ally, weighed in saying Australia's brilliant record during that time had nothing at all to do with Buchanan.
Chappell reckoned if his daughter had coached the Australians, their record would have been the same, possibly even better.
To take this a step further, and in light of coach John Bracewell's sometimes bizarre statements, should New Zealand consider a return to the days - even if only for spells - of coach-less teams when captains were charged with steering the ship, aided of course by senior players and selectors.
The Black Caps go into the series against Bangladesh in a precarious although not hopeless state, and the mood was hardly helped when a national selection was well beaten by the tourists in Twenty20.
Bangladesh are no-names in this country but they scored a couple of great victories in the last World Cup. A shock defeat for the Black Caps would be a body blow to New Zealand cricket right now, and Bracewell is certainly under the hammer.
Why this modern fascination with cricket coaches? The rise of the coach is understandable in other sports. But in cricket? Cricket is such a unique sport, and the relationship between players and coaches is vastly different from, say, football, where there is a strong interaction between teammates on the field.
Cricket is essentially a series of individual performances tied together by the scorebook, although there are of course a few areas of unison. Strategy is firmly in the hands of the captain, or so it should be.
What is most interesting about Bracewell's coaching career is that a large part of what is written and said about him concerns what he says, rather than what he does.
Ostensibly, Bracewell's overly-inflated and controversial role is why Martin Crowe, Bracewell's old teammate and nemesis, and now a TV head honcho, has apparently banned his Sky crews from interviewing him.
Yes, Bracewell has dropped plenty of verbal clangers. But do they really matter?
One charge is that he is creating a dysfunctional team. Yet those of us who recall the magnificent Richard Hadlee years know that the national team of that era were a collection of strong willed combatants as much as comrades.
The stories of stars who were not even on speaking terms within that team are legendary. Apparently the captain, Jeremy Coney, could only communicate to the great man Hadlee through a third party, normally anyone standing around mid-off.
This whole business of team unity is one of the misnomers of sport anyway. Internal rivalry is actually a potential spur. Successful sides can be happy campers, split by division or somewhere in between. There is no set formula.
Bracewell, to my mind, is becoming an excuse for poor performances, rather than the reason for them. The root problem, that New Zealand has never produced enough world class players from out of its domestic set-up, is being lost in the jungle of his words.
From what I can gather, the first dead-set New Zealand coach was Glenn Turner in the mid-1980s, followed by a disparate lot - names that spring to mind are Warren Lees, Geoff Howarth, Steve Rixon, David Trist, Gren Alabaster, Denis Aberhart and of course Braces.
Yes, these men have had some impact. Rixon was credited with raising the fielding standards. In the case of Turner, some players were disciples, while others would have gladly nailed him to a cross.
But has the impact really been of a magnitude that you would associate with the title national coach?
Cricketers are essentially self made men, the ultimate rugged individuals of sport. They have had various influences over the development years, and talent aligned to experience and experimentation brings a few to a place of international class.
A national cricket team is as likely to benefit from the influence of one coach as say an American Ryder Cup golf squad would turn to one mentor. Cricketers are individuals, with individual ways. They need a strategist, and it is the captain who should dominate there.
That is not to say coaches don't have their place, and Bobby Simpson is credited with leading the Australian turnaround in the mid 1980s of course. But maybe the position of national coach should not be mandatory or as exalted as it a has become.
What would be interesting, especially right now, would be a period in which there was no Black Caps coach, where the onus would fall back almost entirely on the players.
It would encourage Daniel Vettori to make this his team, to really grasp the reins.
The series against Bangladesh would have been the ideal start for this. You could be forgiven right now for thinking much of the ills of New Zealand cricket are due to Bracewell, whereas he is essentially powerless to alter the course. You could feed the entire thought patterns of Richard Hadlee into Bracewell's laptop and you would still struggle to get any of the current New Zealand bowlers to figure Ricky Ponting out.
I asked a cricket writer of longstanding recently if he missed covering the sport in his new life. No, he replied, because the perpetual problem for New Zealand cricket, a lack of world class opening batsmen and its domino effect, had eventually ground him down.
The only light in a very long opening batting tunnel was Mark Richardson, the ultimate in self-made batting warriors. Apart from that, a swag of national coaches have not got close to sorting the problem out which hints that such matters are beyond their control.
The weather, the pitch standards, an average national competition, cricket's niche and elitist status, our small population - these are the real problems for New Zealand cricket. John Bracewell is a mere red herring.
Those who have known Bracewell are mystified that a straight talking, well-liked competitor has veered off into tangled lanes.
He looks like a bloke who has been felled by that classic knockout blow of high responsibility shackled to a lack of real power.
