Jason Gillespie has revealed that he had no clear communication with OCB even a day before catches, and other circumstances led him to step down.
Jason Gillespie has revealed that he had no clear communication with the Pakistan Cricket Board (PCB) regarding the playing eleven, even a day before a match and he added that his role as their red-ball coach has just been reduced to him hitting catches.
Jason took the duty of Pakistan’s red-ball coach in April with a two-year deal, and led the team to a 2-1 series victory at home over England in October. Gillespie however resigned from his role last week before Pakistan’s Test series against South Africa. Aaqib Javed has been name the interim Test coach of Pakistan till then.
“I felt I was basically hitting catches, and that was about it on the morning of a game. You want to be able to have clear communication with all stakeholders, with selectors, for instance, knowing what the team is as head coach well before the game, or at least the day before the game,” Jason said on ABC Grandstand show.
He also said that the PCB and he were not able to clearly communicate, with the high-performance coach Tim Neilsen got sacked, and him not having a word in the selection committee, he ultimately stepped down from his rols.
“I went into the job eyes wide open, I want to make that really clear. I knew that Pakistan had cycled through a number of coaches in a pretty short space of time, but I put my case forward and explained how I felt I could help,” Gillespie said.
“You want to create an environment where players are relaxed but focused and get out and do the job and give them the freedom to go out and play the game. I felt that in the red ball, in the Test side, we were very much on track doing that, which culminated in that series win against England,” he added.
“So a lot of good stuff happened from when I took the job on to where things have finished up (now), I didn’t get on the plane on Friday. The straw that broke the camel’s back, I suppose, was, as a head coach, you like to have clear communication with your employer. I was completely and utterly blindsided by a decision to not have a high-performance coach,” he further added.
“Tim Nielsen was told that his services were no longer required and I had absolutely zero communication from anyone about that, and I just thought after a number of other things that had gone on in the previous few months, that was probably the moment where I thought, ‘Well, I’m not really sure if they actually really want me to do this job or not’,” he recalled.
Jason also spoke about how he had such a great relationship with skipper Shan Masood and that the feedback regarding the work of Nielsen has been positive.
“I developed a really close relationship with the test captain, Shan Masood, and felt we were certainly going in the right direction and things were going really well. All the feedback that I’d got or the feedback the PCB got was just how effective Tim had been in his role as well and the players were getting a lot out of him. They called him grandpa and there was some good banter between the boys,” he said.
“Shan and I spoke a lot about that and the players about whether you play one Test match or 100, it’s irrelevant. If you’ve got something of value to contribute to the team you can do that in a safe space and we felt we were making so many gains in that space,” he concluded.
