Job van Bunge has the unmistakable air of a man who has fallen on his feet. In the fifteen months since he moved from Den Haag to Perth, he has successfully found a niche in the WA Cricket Association organisation, working as Cricket Operations Coordinator and as assistant coach for the State women’s team, the Western Fury.
Van Bunge, who ran a cricket school in the Netherlands and latterly coached the national women’s team, also played 263 Hoofdklasse matches for Voorburg and Quick Haag between 1994 and 2009, making 4622 runs at an average of 20.72.
In Perth, his job includes a range of development roles, running the WACA’s two annual school holiday clinics, each involving some 300 children aged between 6 and 18, youth carnivals within the Emerging Warriors programme, and the women’s senior and junior women’s competitions, and he is involved in the coach education programme. He is also match-day manager for the Fury’s home matches, a task which has this season led to the assistant coaching role.
‘It’s brilliant,’ Van Bunge said as we sat talking last week during the opening day of Western Australia’s three-day match against the English tourists. ‘I’ve been able to turn my hobby into my work. And everyone here has been so friendly, making me feel welcome straightaway.’
Van Bunge has also been able to play some club cricket, for grade club Fremantle, although until now he has only been able to get as far as third and fourth grade.
‘It’s a bit frustrating,’ he says with a wry smile. ‘I’ve seen enough to reckon I could go higher, but with the multiple demands of this job my time to practise is limited, and practice sessions are taken very seriously here. If you don’t make practice or you’re late, you’re simply dropped.’
The approach to practice is one of the biggest differences Van Bunge notices between cricket in Perth and in the Netherlands.
‘The first session I attended, I had never trained so hard in my life,’ he says. ‘All the teams practise together, although they work separately and have separate nets. It was a big eye-opener.
‘The function of Net Manager is a recognised volunteer role in the clubs, and it’s his or her task to allocate the four or five turf nets to the different squads in the course of the evening. It all has to be pretty well run because it gets dark much earlier here, but it is well run and everyone gets their turn.’
Seeing the way the clubs train has given Van Bunge new insight into the way player-coaches fit into Dutch cricket, and leads to an interesting observation.
‘There’s really nothing in a young Australian player’s previous experience to prepare him for the job he’s expected to do in Holland,’ he points out. ‘He will never have run a net before – that’s done for him. He just has to turn up and work on his own game.
‘And why, having imported such a player, would you ask him to spend time coaching ten- to thirteen-year-olds, many of whom don’t really speak his language? Why would you? That should be a task for qualified volunteers.’
The sheer difference in scale is, of course, a crucial factor in any comparison between the two situations.
‘The WACA runs a Level 1 coaching course in each of its sixteen metropolitan districts,’ he points out, ‘and last year we produced 450 new Level 1 coaches. We’ve already added another 140 this season.’
Inevitably, that brings in the question of resources: the WACA has an annual budget of more than $A 22m., more than ten times what the KNCB has at its disposal. Its Cricket Operations department alone has a staff of more than 25, while Business Operations have a further 15-20.
‘So much comes back to resources,’ Van Bunge acknowledges. ‘The Western Fury, for example, are making real progress this season in an expanded interstate competition, partly because we have greater resources. That’s making a massive difference.
‘We have, in addition to head coach Steve Philippe and myself, two specialist coaches, a fitness specialist, a part-time video-analyst and a dedicated physiotherapist, all of whom are present at every training session. We are professionalising the approach to the women’s squad, and the results are already evident on the field.’
But the contrast doesn’t only have to do with money, or scale.
‘Cricket’s a part of daily life here,’ the Dutchman points out, ‘and that means there’s a completely different approach.
‘Boys and girls know that if they want to go further in the game they have to work hard, and they do.’
The WACA is nevertheless working hard itself to keep up the momentum. Apart from the clinics and youth carnivals for which Van Bunge himself is responsible, it runs its share of the national ‘in2CRICKET’ programme, sponsored by health drink brand MILO, which brought a structured 6-12 week introductory programme to 6000 WA five-to-ten-year-olds in 2009-10. The scheme is actually run by volunteers, through community cricket clubs and primary schools in both city and country areas.
A hundred or so of its current crop demonstrated its success with Kwik Cricket matches during the lunch interval on the Saturday of the WA-England game.
‘Another major difference is that the clubs actually run their own competition,’ Van Bunge observes. ‘The District Cricket Council, largely made up of club representatives, makes all the key decisions, with WACA staff providing the administrative support.
‘And the Council has committees responsible for discipline, umpire appointments and management, youth cricket and so on. The WACA itself has a much smaller role in club cricket than the KNCB does, I’d reckon.’
The Western Australian association is, of course, just one of the constituents of Cricket Australia, and there’s no doubt about who calls the shots.
‘When Cricket Australia came over to explain their policy on limited-overs cricket, for example,’he recalls, ‘they made it clear that while they were interested in hearing our views, they had already taken the key decisions.
‘It would make no difference that the great majority of players and coaches didn’t like the split of the one-day competition matches into two innings of 20 and 25 overs – that was what was going to happen. The Cricket Australia aim is for the 2015 World Cup to be played in that format.’
Van Bunge is not particularly encouraging, either, about any groundswell of opposition to the plan for a ten-team World Cup.
‘Nobody here cares, it’s not on the agenda’ he says. ‘When people here find out I’m from Holland, they’re often surprised I know which end of the bat to hold.’
hat hasn’t prevented him from playing a couple of times on the WACA’s sacred turf, for the Lord’s Taverners’ XI in their annual match against the State Governor’s XI.
‘The first time I batted I made a half-century, which confirmed that I can play a bit. It’s a wonderfully intimate ground – when you’re out in the middle, you can see every face in the crowd. It’s a brilliant place, and I feel very lucky to be here.’