Within a month, Langer was gone, and the perception was that Cricket Australia were dancing to the players’ tune a classic example of player power. Having apparently tired of four years of his famously thorough methods, they openly discussed coaches with a lighter touch than Langer, including the former England coach Trevor Bayliss. Pat Cummins was there, with David Warner, and Langer’s assistants, Andrew McDonald and Michael Di Venuto, as well as other members of support staff. When Ponting referenced the small group of players and coaches, he might just have been referring to those who gathered at the Den, a Hobart bar, a few days out from the final Ashes Test last January. I actually think it’s a really sad day as far as Australian cricket is concerned.” Hobart bar meeting plotted Langer downfall
“That’s been enough to force out a man that has put his life and heart and soul into Australian cricket and done a sensational job of turning around the culture and the way the Australian cricket team has been looked at over the past three or four years. “Reading the tea leaves it sounds like a few – and as he says to me a small group in the playing group and a couple of other staff around the team – haven’t entirely loved the way he has gone about it. “It seems like a very strange time for a coach to be departing,” said Ricky Ponting. He is also from Western Australia, the most parochial of the six states, where fans could not believe he was removed. Langer, hugely successful as a player and a coach, had many influential friends who were affronted. Langer left in February 2022, having only been offered a six-month contract extension as reward for winning the T20 World Cup and Ashes in the space of a few weeks. It was that final point that most irked former players. The causes of these accusations are many and varied a more convivial on-field style since the cultural earthquake that was sandpaper-gate, the vocal stances of individual players on issues such as climate change and animal rights, and the manner and timing of Justin Langer’s departure as coach last year. The charge is that Australia’s players are too soft, too cosseted, too powerful and, perhaps most significantly, too “woke”. This battle extends to the current crop of players and large pockets of their own cricketing public, too. The Ashes always presents a culture clash on the field but off it a culture war has rumbled for more than a year between different generations of Australian cricketers.
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