Allan Donald stays on with England

Anyone else delighted about this? Allan Donald's staying on as England's bowling coach.

Donald's a man who knows how to take the odd Test wicket having achieved the feat 330 times. We don't believe that a successful playing career necessarily adds up to a coaching qualification in itself, but if someone's been as successful as Allan Donald has, you can bet that they've put at least a little bit of thought into their endeavours.

All we've got to go off is that at the start of the Test series against the West Indies - when Donald first joined up with England's bowlers - both Steve Harmison and Liam Plunkett were experiencing a rather public meltdown.

At the end of the Test series, Harmison, having steadily improved, delivered his best spell of bowling in perhaps years. Plunkett was summarily removed from Test cricket for humane reasons, but bowled with much greater discipline in the first one-day international.

It's hard to quantify, but Donald at least appears to be having an impact and England's bowlers seem to like, respect and trust him.

Besides, as far as the ECB are concerned; to lose one bowling coach may be regarded as a misfortune; to lose another looks like carelessness.

Peter Moores is new England coach

That didn't take long. Peter Moores has been confirmed as the long-term successor to Duncan Fletcher, as England's coach.

We're perfectly happy with this. We like the idea that things are run with structure and a plan. We tend to freewheel in our own everyday life and that hasn't translated into a great deal of success. We were fine with the other candidates, Tom Moody and Dav Whatmore as well, but Peter Moores knows the players and is greatly responsible for turning Sussex, one of the smaller counties, into very much the dominant force in county cricket.

We're also pleased because this picture clearly shows that Rob Key is ASTOUNDED by Peter Moores' methods. If they're good enough for Rob, they're good enough for us. Peter Moores is probably instructing Rob to save his trick of floating in the air, surrounded by glowing light until after he's played himself in. This is a revelation for Rob, but when he tries it there will be HELL TO PAY for the world's bowlers.

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Duncan Fletcher resigns as England coach

This is very much just confirmation of what we've all known for a few days now. There was no way that Duncan Fletcher could continue after this winter.

It's sad that his time as England coach ends like this, because overall he's been a huge success. When Fletcher took over the England team in 1999, they were an absolute shambles. Every now and again selectorial decisions led to a half-decent side which would promptly be dismantled for the next match. It was baffling and ineffectual.

Duncan Fletcher introduced the rather novel approach of planning ahead. England started to identify players who could represent the country in the long-term. They were picked and they were persevered with. From this foundation, Fletcher could work with individual players, improving them and actually reaping the rewards. These players were then capable of carrying out specific plans. England actually functioned as a team - not just 11 of them, either.

Under Nasser Hussain, England learnt to fight and became hard to beat. Under Michael Vaughan they learnt how to win.

England's Ashes tour was a rank failure because Fletcher didn't seem to acknowledge that his long-term plans had been largely scuppered through injuries. There didn't seem to be a plan B. Instead Fletcher went against his entire ethos, chopping and changing players. Perhaps he was kidding himself that returns for old favourites were evidence of forward-thinking, when in fact it was just desperate short-termism.

England's one-day side has never been good. It's also never benefitted from any consistency of selection. Maybe it's not one match and out. It's more one tour and out. As this World Cup began, England's team was a rag-tag assortment of very recent successes and underperforming veterans.

Fletcher never made any headway with the one-day team and ever since the Test team plateaued and even regressed, his days have been numbered.

We started this post with the intention of celebrating Duncan Fletcher's achievements, but sporting ends are very rarely celebratory.

Greg Chappell resigns as India coach

We're not upset about this. Greg Chappell always strikes us the kind of person who says: 'If I've got a problem with someone, I'll tell them. I'll tell them to their face. That's just me.'

People who say that ALWAYS have problems with people. They have problems with everyone. This is because they're dicks.

Greg Chappell also took the rather unusual step of publicly humiliating Sourav Ganguly in an interview with Mike Selvey of the Guardian, about this time last year.

We thought this was staggeringly unprofessional, actually quite petty and maybe rather stupid as well. Particularly when you consider that Ganguly later returned to the side. That wouldn't have been awkward then. Ho no no.

Maybe Chappell's a great technical coach, we don't know, but as a bloke he clearly rubs many people up the wrong way.

We don't doubt for a minute that privately and maybe publicly, Greg Chappell considers himself to be not in the least bit responsible for India's premature World Cup exit. There are claims that he's questioned the attitude of senior India players during the World Cup.

Lash out, Greg. Blame anyone but yourself.

Bob Woolmer dies at 58

This is agonisingly sad. Pakistan's coach, Bob Woolmer, has died at the age of just 58.

We've always liked Bob Woolmer. He was an Englishman with a broad world view. He was born in India, coached South Africa and was now lending his expertise to the Pakistani cause.

He was a progressive man too. You'll be hard-pressed to find an obituary that doesn't mention how he was at the forefront in the use of technology in coaching. Not that he let that go too far. He knew that players weren't robots and that cricket is above all a mind game. Bob Woolmer believed that a happy player was a good player. This seems a fairer reflection of a man who always seemed genial, laid-back and above all, honest.

It could have been sad that his final act as a coach was to oversee a humiliating upset at the hands of Ireland and as a consequence Pakistan's failure in the World Cup. Fortunately, it seems that the cricketing community has a far longer memory than that and that loss has been buried beneath a heap of praise and respect the volume of the Himalayan mountain range. Good. That's the way it should be.

It's hard to know how to end this obituary. I'm going to use a quote from Bob's website, which was a fascinating read, particularly when he first took over Pakistan and was taking stock of the talent at his disposal. We remember him commenting that there seemed to be another six world-class pace bowlers turning up at the nets each day.

Anyway, the quote's a bit hackneyed, but the philosophy's worthy and it sums up Bob Woolmer's approach to coaching.

“Your mind is like a parachute - if it does not open it will not work.”