Australia is set to tour India for Test and ODI series beginning in February. Ahead of the matches, former spinner Steve O'Keefe has suggested having separate coaches for the Kangaroos in different formats to help reduce the pressure on one individual.
"The Aussie team has got India and England coming up, that takes a lot out of you and I think having a pool of coaches that you can go to for white ball, T20 and one-day cricket would ease that burden.
Andrew McDonald is currently Australia's all-format coach after he replaced Justin Langer last year ahead of the series against Pakistan.
O'Keefe, who played nine Tests and seven T20Is, felt if the two-coach model could work for England, there was no reason why it won't work for Australia. The Test team under coach Brendon McCullum has won nine out of 10 Tests, while under Matthew Mott, England won the T20 World Cup in Australia last year.
"I think following an England model would work… it's a lot of pressure on coaches to travel, they're away 300 days of the year sometimes," the former Australia spinner said.
With Australia set for a busy year that includes the Border-Gavaskar series, Ashes and the ODI World Cup in India, among other assignments, O'Keefe feels the time is right to get separate head coaches.
"They are, now, in particular, starkly different games. I'm not taking anything away from Andrew McDonald; he's a fantastic coach, but I think in the future if we had a white-ball and a red-ball coach that would be the way forward."
Recently, Australian Cricketers’ Association (ACA) CEO Todd Greenberg expressed concern over the increasing workload of players, saying it was getting difficult for them to play all three formats.
"That’s getting harder and harder, and it's getting harder and harder… to play three formats of the game," Greenberg had said in December.
"I think in the next 5-10 years, it will be impossible to play all three formats in every way. It’s not physically possible, it's also not mentally possible, so there has to be a choice."
(Inputs from PTI)
