Who will be the next Australian cricket coach — Justin Langer, Jason Gillespie or Ricky Ponting?
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-20/w ... tion=sportThe head coach's seat in the Australian cricket team dugout is currently vacant. The fallout from the ball-tampering scandal in South Africa and the sight of three of his players in tears over it convinced Darren Lehmann to call stumps a year ahead of schedule.
As Cricket Australia begins its search for the man to lead the national team out of the wreckage of Cape Town, who are the candidates in line to replace Lehmann. And what are their chances of being handed the role?
Justin Langer
Langer has long been viewed as the natural successor to Darren Lehmann coaching the men's national team, having already led the side in 2016 for an ODI tour of the West Indies when Lehmann took a break.
A no-nonsense coach of high principles and an uncompromising leadership style, he is viewed in many quarters as the kind of hard task master needed to bring order back to a dressing room. One that was allowed in many observers' eyes — with disastrous consequences after initial success in terms of results — to become too relaxed and chummy under Lehmann.
The forthcoming appointment is about more than cricket, as Australia looks inwards and considers fundamental issues of behaviour and team culture.
Stories abound of Langer's firm hand with players. Most recently Darcy Short credits some tough love from Langer — who demanded the talented but unfocused batsman lose weight and get serious or ship out — as turning his career around.
Langer, a devoted Christian, is known to value ethics and respect as highly as he does technique.
Jason Gillespie
While Gillespie shared a dressing room with Langer during the period of Australian dominance in the 1990s, he has always been viewed as a different kind of character to those around him during his playing days.
And that is something that may appeal to selectors as they seek to forge a new identity for the Baggy Green in the wake of the ball-tampering scandal.
A good-natured, thoughtful man, Gillespie is respected across all cricket cultures, both domestically and internationally.
The brief of shifting the culture would sit comfortably with a man who, while a fierce competitor with ball in hand, has proved a progressive, inclusive figure since retirement.
His coaching CV is also strong. He picked up an underperforming Yorkshire side in England's County Championship and turned them into twice winners of the competition.
As an aside, with England captained by one of his former pupils at Yorkshire, Joe Root, and well stacked with players from that county, his inside knowledge come the 2019 Ashes may be another tick in his favour.
Having led the Adelaide Strikers to their first Big Bash League victory earlier this year, there is evidence he knows how to construct and shepherd sides in different formats and different conditions, a versatility of value in the modern game.
Gillespie had been a strong contender for the England job before another Australian, Trevor Bayliss, took over in 2015. And with Bayliss's relationship with English fans strained at present, there is a suggestion Gillespie may yet be on the sidelines in 2019 in opposition to Australia, rather than in charge of them.
Having recently taken over a management role at Sussex, there may be contractual and financial hurdles for cricket Australia to clear, should they offer him the job, but nothing that should prove insurmountable.
Ricky Ponting
Ponting's success in captaining the side between 2004 and 2011, and near bottomless wealth of cricketing knowledge, has long marked him out as a potential national team coach.
Though he has repeatedly gone on record to say he wasn't interested in a full-time international role, especially as he has a young family he is understandably keen to spend time with, something the demands of international coaching prohibits.
Extraordinary times can change minds, however. And in Australia's time of need there is a suggestion he might be compelled to return to right the ship that has gone so drastically off course.
Ponting has had a recent taste of coaching within the national set-up, having been an assistant during last summer's Twenty20 series against Sri Lanka, as well as the recent tri-series involving England and New Zealand.
The full-time role as T20 coach, with growing enthusiasm for splitting the job between short form and Test cricket, was already pencilled in as his — were it to be created — prior to the events in Cape Town and the subsequent fall-out.
I am thinking 
if the Bookie had fixed something behind the scenes 
