KEY POINTS:
It is one of the oldest and most rhetorical questions in sport: Who'd be a coach?
Along with Chelsea football coach Jose Mourinho forced to quit the club after never losing a match at home but falling out with the billionaire owner, is the story of former New Zealand, Auckland and Central Districts batsman Mark Greatbatch.
He has just left his job as coach of Warwickshire in difficult circumstances, replaced by the man who has just retired as a player and who has little or no coaching experience - England left-arm spinner and Warwickshire stalwart Ashley Giles.
The tale has another Kiwi twist to it - one of the candidates for Greatbatch's job was Dermot Reeve, the former England all-rounder but who was principally famous for being fired as a cricket commentator after a newspaper story and his admission in 2005 that he was addicted to cocaine. Reeve left England and has been laying low in Queenstown, playing or coaching club cricket, before returning to England late last month to pursue the Warwickshire opportunity.
That chance came about because Warwickshire - which produced a rare treble of titles in Reeve's time in the 90s - slumped to a position of double relegation from England cricket's two main competitions.
Greatbatch inherited a side which had done well in 2004 and 2005 but had maybe over-achieved. He had a hard act to follow in former coach and much-loved former Australian test batsman John Inverarity.
Greatbatch went into the job in a blaze of publicity and a great deal of enthusiasm with only a few doubting his credentials as, other than Giggleswick School in Yorkshire, he had little coaching history outside of CD and a time with the NZ under-19 team.
But the manner of his departure underlines that coaches can have it tough, really tough, and as Greatbatch himself said to the Birmingham Post recently: "When a team plays well, the players get the accolades but when they lose the coach bears the brunt."
There is a lot of truth in that and it is also evident, no matter what the sporting code, that when things go wrong, coaches often tend to get bigger dents hammered in their careers than players do. Players, on most occasions when they make a mistake or are dropped, have the chance to come again - with, it must be said, the exception of those player gaffes which once committed are never forgotten by selectors or sporting nations with elephantine memories, like New Zealand, for example.
But, have a look at what the cricket writer of the Birmingham Post, the respected George Dobell wrote, chronicling Greatbatch's downfall at Edgbaston, one of the great bases within English cricket: "Fate did not deal Greatbatch the best of hands. He inherited a team that had over-performed in 2004 And 2005, with key players [Nick Knight and Dougie Brown] in decline and a youth and coaching system that has not, for all the money pumped into it, delivered in the quantity that it should have done in recent years.
"But it was his fault that Mark Wagh left. It was his fault that Moeen Ali left. It was his fault that he alienated senior players like Michael Powell and Brown who had only the best interests of the club at heart. And it was his fault that the side played unattractive cricket. For Greatbatch distrusts flair.
"It didn't help that his style contrasted so much with his predecessor's. The calm detachment of John Inverarity was replaced by a brooding menace in the dressing-room as Greatbatch's desire to succeed sometimes manifested itself in sullen anxiety.
"His passion was untamed. He sulked when he lost; shouted when he was angry. Instead of lifting the dressing-room in trying times, he became the chief mourner; the source of negativity.
"There will, generally, be a sense of relief in the dressing-room. At the end of the 2006 season, Greatbatch was detested by several players; by mid-2007, he was irrelevant to nearly all of them. He offered little hands-on coaching and had little that was inspirational to give in terms of personal example or communication skills.
"Quite where he will go remains a mystery. The cricket world is not large and Greatbatch's reputation has been severely damaged. It will prove desperately tough to gain a similarly high-profile role."
Tough stuff. The Greatbatch I remember playing for Auckland and New Zealand is not the man of Dobell's passages although I could never claim to have known Greatbatch well and I have no reason to doubt Dobell, who finished his piece wishing Greatbatch well.
It is to be hoped Greatbatch gets his coaching career back on track.
But the whole episode underlines the point: a bad time for a player can be forgotten with the next good performance; but a bad time for a coach can mean there isn't even the opportunity for another performance.
