MELBOURNE: Cricket Australia’s (CA) new chairman Lachlan Henderson said on Thursday the board would reflect on its handling of Justin Langer’s contract after the head coach’s resignation in acrimony this month.
Langer had hoped for a long contract extension after Australia won the Twenty20 World Cup and thrashed England in the Ashes but the former test opener was offered only six months.
Former players and pundits said CA had treated Langer poorly, though test captain Pat Cummins endorsed the board’s decision and said players were ready for a new coach.
Henderson said the board might have dealt more quickly with Langer, given the weeks of media speculation that built after the Ashes over his future in the role.
“It is unfortunate that a bit of that played out in the media and we’ll reflect on whether that should have been accelerated through the summer,” Henderson told reporters in Melbourne on Thursday.
“But it was always our intention to make that decision at the end of the summer, and we followed that process.
“It got messy in terms of things playing out in the media.”
Henderson, a CA director for three years and chief executive of a major healthcare firm, replaced interim chairman Richard Freudenstein, who stepped in to the role in October after predecessor Earl Eddings lost support from state member associations and resigned.
CA has been under the microscope since the Newlands ball-tampering scandal erupted in 2018 and triggered a scathing review of the board’s governance.
CA was embarrassed in November when former test captain Tim Paine resigned over a four-year-old “sexting” scandal that the governing body elected to keep from the public.
Henderson said he would look to appoint an ethics commissioner early in his term to meet one of the unfulfilled recommendations of the 2018 governance review.
“My communication style will be open, transparent and hopefully consistent,” he said.
“Within the bounds of the confidentiality of boards, I hope there’s a really open and transparent way forward.”
(Additional reporting by Andrew Both in Ballarat, Australia; Editing by Cynthia Osterman and Ed Osmond)
