A little more love and care

Ray Jennings is a troubleshooter, a man with the fearlessness necessary to knock egotistical heads together, kick backsides and horsewhip people into pulling in the same direction. He loves to play mindgames and there isn't much he won't do to get the best out of players, even if that means that they lose respect for him, or even hate him.

When he took over the South African team at the start of his six-month appointment in November, he inherited half a dozen big names who had grown soft in a blanket of complacency that had cost the previous coach, Eric Simons, his job.

So Jennings kicked arse. He humiliated Herschelle Gibbs by revealing his sloth, he ridiculed Nicky Boje for refusing to travel to India ("We go there three times in the next couple of years - what does he want to be, a non-playing spinner?"), and he cast doubts on the application and commitment of several others.

He then showed he didn't operate on empty threats, and shoe-horned two of his best mates into the touring party to India; men who otherwise wouldn't have been considered - Andrew Hall and Zander de Bruyn.

Jennings and his lieutenants re-instilled a typically South African bloody-mindedness that had been absent - but to those who dreamt of entertaining cricket, or even victory, watching the team crawl along in their first innings until lunch on the third day of the first Test at Kanpur was a miserable experience. Passion and pride are great assets, but they are short-term assets when used as the prime tools in a team's strategy. And this could be why Jennings finds himself out now: he fulfilled his brief by raising South Africa out of a mire.

Jennings also struggles to develop stable, long-term relationships with his players, but that doesn't mean he can't 'motivate' them to achieve some extraordinary results. Take Makhaya Ntini, for example.

After a weak effort on one of the flattest pitches in the world (Guyana) in the recent series against West Indies, Jennings humiliated the proud Xhosa man before his team-mates, telling Ntini that his place in the team was not assured. Ntini was confused, disheartened and angry - and Jennings was quick to claim the credit for this 'old-fashioned' style of motivation.

In fact, Ntini spent three days working with Vincent Barnes, the assistant coach, working on technical aspects of his bowling action, which led to his South African record haul of 13 for 132 in the second Test in Trinidad. But Jennings and his fans preferred to believe otherwise.

The new man in, Mickey Arthur, may not be a household name, even in his own house, but that is no bad thing. "The big-name coaches often don't know what it's like to struggle," He says with a grin and a shrug of the shoulders. "I have no reputation to protect and I am not on an ego trip. I will take and use all the help I can get."

Arthur has a modest first-class career record but there was never a more committed team man in any XI which included him. He is meticulous in his planning, relentless in his work and possesses a charming mixture of passion and logic. "I can be a table-thumper when things go wrong, for sure, but not without a solution and a plan," he says. "You have to let off steam but there's no point screaming and shouting without having a plan to put things right."