Oh, how we laughed at the old boy, striding onto LinkedIn, refuge of the creatively thwarted, with a few folksy learnings to keep us in smug podcasts for weeks. These naff hymns to selfdom, posted at a messy time for his team, with murmurs of player revolts leaking from inside the shed, felt like a tipping point. To the untrained ear they sounded much like Langer’s breakout song, the first move to unhooking himself from a job which had stopped being fun.
In January, India’s stiffs had beaten them at home, cleaning up at The Gabba, a second successive defeat at home in the biggest tie in Test cricket. By July, Bangladesh were turning them over in a series for the first time. By August, Langer was forced to face up to a procession of insider leaks portraying him as surly, prone to mood swings and overly intense around the dressing room. Further stories said he’d been frantically trying to repair broken ties with senior players. He conceded that the reports were “a wakeup call”, while everyone else pointed to that Amazon doco and shrugged.