Australian head coach Darren Lehmann has revealed that he knew that team was on the right track when they all assembled with their wives and partners to attend the birthday dinner for the cancer-stricken wife of the team bus driver.
Only weeks after being parachuted into his new job as Australian coach during the Ashes in England last year, there was a birthday dinner for driver Pom Geoff Goodwin's wife Suzanne, who was seriously ill with cancer.
According to News.com.au, Lehmann, who brought a family-first mantra to the coaching job, said that he knew that the team was on the right path when all the players and the support staff, along with their wives and partners, turned up for the party on the bus, even though the invitations were optional.
Lehmann further said that this convinced him that the players were concerned about not only themselves, but other people as well, adding that making people's lives better as a group and a family is what the team had needed to be all along.
For all the training and planning sessions Lehmann had led, it has been the enormous cultural shift in Australian cricket that has been his biggest influence especially after the 2013 meltdown in Mohali with four players sacked from a Test and Shane Watson flying home immediately.
Lehmann's caring, family-first approach, getting partners and families involved at every opportunity, is part of his life-is-too-short mantra, the report added.
