Investigating academy coaches’ epistemological beliefs in red and white ball cricket

Cricket and specifically cricket coaches are presented with challenges unlike many other sports. Coaches are tasked with developing players’ skills and abilities to play two distinct and increasingly specialist formats of the game, namely red ball and white ball cricket. To examine differences across these two styles, data collection used observations (n= 18), semi-structured interviews (n=23) and focus groups (n=2) with a group of coaches who actively coached both styles to the same groups of players. Two storybook themes were developed and represented a substantial and original contribution to the literature. These were; i) get your head down, listen to me and you’ll be right; in RBC as contrasted with ii) players getting stuck in to learning in WBC. Findings suggest coaches held different epistemological beliefs and actioned different epistemological chains. Fundamentally, coaches’ approaches were considerably different across RBC and WBC. We conclude by considering the significant implications of the findings in the form of an extension of the epistemology literature and the ongoing opportunity for cricket coach development.