O’Donnell urges Langer to ‘move on’

FORMER Australian cricketer Simon O’Donnell has urged Justin Langer to be careful with the way he speaks about his tenure as head coach of the national team.

Langer criticised captain Pat Cummins and others around the Australian team on former AFL player Will Schofield’s Backchat Podcast which created plenty of headlines.

He spoke of the time leading up to his departure as Australia coach and his opinion of how it all fell apart.

“I spoke to Pat Cummins. He said to me about five times, ‘This might be brutally honest’,” Langer said.

“I said, ‘Pat, there is nothing brutal about your feedback. What is brutal is I’m hearing it behind my back through the media or through sources’.

“No one’s telling me. Tell me.

“People say that I’m very intense, but they’re mistaking intensity with honesty.”

Langer added, “I’ve never said this publicly, the hardest thing for me of it all was I got the feedback.

“Then I did something about it, we won the T20 World Cup, we won the Ashes, we were the number one in the world, I’ve never enjoyed coaching more and I still got sacked.

“That’s the hardest thing.”

Langer’s honesty has since been both criticised and praised.

O’Donnell believes the former opening batsman is somewhat tarnishing his legacy with the way he is handling the situation by crying foul.

“Unfortunately he hasn’t ridden off into the sunset, waved goodbye and enjoyed all he’s achieved,” O’Donnell said on SEN Breakfast.

“That’s the ugly side of this. He’s got to be really careful not to lose the room.

“The key ingredient, still at the end of the day, is the game is bigger than the individual. There’s a lot of people that have left Australian cricket over the journey and other sports disgruntled. It doesn’t mean you just roll it back out there and have your say.

“I’d like him to stop and if he needs to do anything about it, I think he needs to go through other channels other than just letting fly on podcasts or news services etcetera.”

O’Donnell acknowledges that Langer is free to have his say, but he is worried that his friendships will be impacted by his passionate responses.

He believes it is time to let go of the grudge towards Cricket Australia.

“He can be free to speak, I’m not saying he shouldn’t speak, that’s up to him,” O’Donnell said.

“But I think he loses relationships hand over fist the more he speaks about it the longer the period is that he’s gone.

“You can’t just carry these grudges forever. You’ve got to move on and it’s taking him a while to move on.

“I love Justin Langer, I love what he did for Australian cricket, but Justin wasn’t sacked. Justin was offered a six-month extension to his contract which he didn’t agree with.

“At the end of the day, it came down to Justin saying, ‘Hey, I want longer than that’, and Cricket Australia said, ‘No, we think that’s the right period of time’.

“It wasn’t ‘you’re out’. Let’s get it straight, Cricket Australia did say your tenure can continue, but he chose not to do that.”

– BY ANDREW SLEVISON/ SEN