Buchanan's brain the secret of Australian success

Ask a sporting audience to outline John Buchanan's contribution to Australia's irresistible World Cup campaign and the answer would probably be: "John who?" Which would be fine by the coach.

Cricket coaches come in three flavours: those who have played the game at the highest level, those who haven't, and the Ian Chappell coach – it transports the players to the game. Chappell thinks cynicism best presses the old school's favourite point, that a team of internationals should not need coaching. Well, did you see Bangladeshin the World Cup?

Some of Chappell's disaffection with Australia's need for a coach arises from the appointment in the mid-Eighties of Bob Simpson, not Chappell's favourite cricketing person. Simpson and Buchanan illustrate the classist nature of coaching: the former, who coached Australia to their first World Cup win in 1987, was high-profile, a former Australian captain. Buchanan, whose teams have won the last two cups, was just another average all-rounder. When he was appointed in 1994 to coach Queensland, then Australia's most famous losing Sheffield Shield team, Buchanan's critics mocked his nondescript career status: seven first-class matches, 160 runs and no wickets. Simpson scored 21,029 runs, took 349 wickets and grabbed 383 catches.

Buchanan responded: "The whole business about coaching is not whether you've scored 3,000 runs in Test cricket but whether you can have players aspire to and achieve such figures." Ten months later, Queensland won the Shield for the first time in 63 seasons, but the critics said Buchanan had just "got lucky". They mocked his methods, one of which was to grasp ideas from other sports, utilising philosophies and motivational, management and movement techniques.

To return the critics' serve, Buchanan could have offered this from Darrell Royal, an American football coach: "Luck usually follows people who are trying to do something, it doesn't look around for stumblebums."

Most contentious was his use of a computer to analyse player performance and match trends. Eventually, he built a video library of every opposition player to identify more precisely weaknesses and strengths. After all, what's more effective in a team meeting: the old school's five words stressing an opponent's flaw, or modern technology's five replays?

Have you ever seen a faster, sharper fielding outfit than the Australians? Recently Buchanan employed a baseball coach to perfect technique in sliding to the ball, bounce-throws and relay throws. It's not so long ago that baseball was said to be a threat to cricket in Australia.

Orthodoxy demands any Australian Player of The Cup award go to Ricky Ponting. This philosophy from Jack Gibson, an Australian football coach, reflects Ponting's contribution: "The tough individual is the bloke who can stick his ego in his back pocket. It doesn't matter what happens in adversity, he won't be distracted from what he's trying to do. It takes a single-minded athlete to do that."

Truth is, and it is to Buchanan's credit as a manager of men, Gibson's wisdom could apply to anyone from the intimidating Brett Lee and the cool Michael Bevan to the maturing Andrew Symonds or the gutsy Damien Martyn. Yet unorthodoxy would give the gong to Andy Bichel. He stepped up for Jason Gillespie and Shane Warne. Who can forget his running-out of Aravinda De Silva at a knife-edge moment in the semi-final? The swerve sideways in his follow-through, picking up left-handed, pivoting, transferring the ball to his right hand, then throwing down the stumps. Magic. And he was three times a major player on the character-testing Port Elizabeth pitch.

We should not be surprised. In the same Sheffield Shield final Buchanan made his name, then rookie Bichel's late- swing bowling first caught the eye of the Test selectors. He was dubbed "The Man from Nowhere".

Next stop is the Caribbean, and he and Buchanan will be working with their other captain, Steve Waugh, whose shadow hung over every moment of Australia's campaign. Only history will tell if Ponting should have been granted continuity, but so dominant was Waugh's end-of-season form that no selection panel could have realistically considered pushing him sideways to hasten generational leadership change in a Test team whose average age is now 30 years and six months.

"Dominate" is Buchanan's message to his players; his warning "there's no such thing as perfection – but let's keep trying to achieve it". Four years ago in the Caribbean his team failed both tests and were lucky to draw the Test series 2-2. The momentum of the World Cup should be enough to repel any West Indian home-turf advantage.