Matthew Hayden, Mitchell Johnson slam players and Cricket Australia after Justin Langer's resignation as head coach
Matthew Hayden has slammed the national players for not publicly supporting Justin Langer in the lead-up to his resignation as Australia's chief coach. Langer, under whose guidance Australia won the T20 World Cup and the Ashes series 4-0, stepped down on Saturday after facing complaints from players about his coaching style for months. "If he was waiting for the current Australian cricket team to be presenting a face of care, I dare say they won't be and that's, to me, the real sadness around this," an emotional Hayden told ABC Sport. Handed the captaincy following Tim Paine's unceremonious exit, Pat Cummins didn't endorse Langer as coach and had insisted that reviewing his suitability for the role was fair in a "high-performance environment". Hayden was critical of Cummins, who was one of the players who had raised concerns about Langer's coaching style last year and also described the whole evaluation process as unhealthy.
"This was not a healthy process," said the 50-year-old, who had formed a formidable opening pair with Langer during his playing days. "This was a bloke (Langer) that won the Ashes, stayed back basically in Melbourne for the entire time while this dragged on for a month. The whole thing just reeks of being orchestrated from basically the moment all of this garbage started coming out in the middle of last year. "You could see that the writing was on the wall. If I had a bet back then that Justin Langer would have retained his spot at the end of his contract, I would have put my whole life's savings on him not doing it."
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