Have you made this team great, or have they made you?

This chapter discusses the emergence of technocratic ideas in the cricket world – ideas, that’s to say, of the game as an area of expertise. It concentrates on the emergence to greater prominence of the cricket coach. Its central arguments are: that the word ‘coach’ has, at the highest level, come to mean less ‘the person who imparts technical instruction’ and more ‘the person responsible – and accountable – for team performance’; that the growing acceptance of this notion has challenged and, thus, provoked often strong argument over traditional ideas of masculinity and national identity in cricket. The chapter draws on an article I wrote in 2000 ¹ and on work I did in collaboration with the Indian cricket writer Sharda Ugra, first published in 2009. ²