When will we see the first truly freelance cricketer?

                                       

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Jon Hotten

Grand Slam tennis champ Andy Murray had what was generally accepted as a bad year last year, undergoing surgery on his back, losing his coach, Ivan Lendl, and then restructuring his "backroom team", apparently after they found it hard to accept Lendl's replacement, Amelie Mauresmo. Murray's assistant coach and his fitness coach took their leave.
Considering that Murray travels the world with his girlfriend and sometimes his mother, also a distinguished coach, his career has the dimensions of a mini-business - lucrative, sure, yet dedicated to the kind of fine margins that separate the very best players from the pack. Murray has won more than $34m in prize money, so his investment in micro-management is worthwhile.

It's a situation that occurs regularly in golf too. At the time of Justin Rose's US Open win two years ago, he credited his caddy, his swing coach, his manager, his psychologist and his wife as vital members of his entourage. Rose has won more than $41m in his career to date.
These vast sums exceed those currently available to elite cricketers, but you wonder how long it will be until the truly freelance player begins to build something similar around their career.
Kevin Pietersen finds himself in such a position, not retained by Surrey and perhaps restrained by the salary cap in finding another county. His immediate future is one of jet-hopping to franchise tournaments, a slave to their calendar. How should he manage a lifestyle no longer geared to consistency? The maintenance and improvement of his skills falls beyond the usual support systems of a central contract or a county set-up. Essentially he is on his own until he gets to his franchise, where he may or may not have worked with the coaching staff before.
Pietersen noted how hard he found playing in England's T20 Blast last season, where he batted just once a week and most of his team-mates were engaged in other competitions in the meantime.
It's easy to step a little further into the future, when such players are perhaps younger and the money on offer in franchise cricket is more substantial, and see the idea of an individual coaching set-up beginning to emerge.
T20 is a specialist game, and as its roles become increasingly defined, the specialist freelance - a guy who rocks up and bowls four overs at 95mph, for example, or a dedicated finisher - may envision a career where he arrives at his franchise as a fully realised package, his training, fitness, match planning and preparation all part of the service he offers.
Such specialist coaches, attached to a single player rather than a group, could mean a deepening of technical thought in very specific areas, resulting in the kind of marginal gains that separate the great from the very good and the merely good.
Golfers and tennis players carry entourages because they believe that they will pay for themselves in the end. Individual sports have always been lonely places too, a constant grind of travel, hotels, training, preparation, play, and the long hours of waiting. While the franchise cricketer may not be quite as isolated, constant team-hopping makes its own demands; endless adjustments to new regimes. The stable base of a permanent coaching environment may improve performance too. And where else should the franchise player turn in the event of injury, especially long-term?
Ultimately such a notion would come down to finance. It seems fanciful at the moment. Yet when a tournament catches the public imagination, as this year's Big Bash has, the sums available to a match-winner will begin to escalate. It may make sense for both players and franchises to provide and buy off-the-shelf solutions.
Now maybe I'll set up a management company to kick it all off.