cricket with balls

Dear BLACKCAPS

I enclose herewith my application to be your coach.

I set out below my suitability for the position in accordance with your specified requirements. I accept that I may not have any experience in the actual field of coaching cricket, but I note that performance of the BLACKCAPS has not improved under a coach with actual cricket experience.

What the BLACKCAPS need is an individual who surveys the world of cricket whilst not being actively involved, so who better than a cricket BLOGGER. More importantly, I have ample cricket blogging COMMENTING experience, and what is a coach if not someone who passes comment on other people’s efforts.

In response to the main criteria put forward:

1. Coached at an elite level within the last 12 months

Within the last 12 months I have successfully performed the following at elite level:

• taken pictures of cats being indifferent to cricket
• compared men I’ve slept with to test nations
• asked AQA many questions about cricket
• learnt how to use google analytics
• made at least two bad jokes about Latin
• written an over-by-over report of the IPL final whilst drinking a bottle of pink cava and eating a bowl of noodles.

2. A proven track record as a world class coach as demonstrated by results

I have proven world class ability in the following:

• styling my difficult hair and maintaining an expensive, complex hair colour (skills which I intend to share with the team, who are currently sporting some of the worst highlights in world cricket)
• matching shoes with clothes on a daily basis
• obsessive attention to grammatical detail
• campaigning for the retention of the paragraph in cricket blogging.

3. Outstanding leadership, communication and people management skills

• I have plenty of experience of dominating leading people (particularly those who might be compared with New Zealand).

4. The desire to pursue everything with energy and drive and a need to win

• I am BADASS. I once served proceedings on two individuals on Valentine’s day to make sure that they would accept the envelope.

5. The ability to generate, direct and manage the implementation of cutting edge coaching solutions and programmes

• I am accomplished in achieving synergies in blue sky thinking, and running ideas up the flagpole to see who salutes.
• I will ensure that all team players are singing from the same hymnsheet, and will ask them to hum a few more bars for me in order to conversate with them.
• I intend to touch base with you from the get-go about how I am a product evangelist with the ability to incentivise, and I am aware that you can’t turn a tanker round with a speed boat change.
• I will implement a holistic cradle-to-grave approach, so as to pluck the low hanging fruit with 360-degree thinking.
• I will not let the grass grow too long on this one, and will get all my ducks in a row.
• At the end of the day, the role concerns actioning, stepping up to the plate and facing the music, and I intend to ensure that stakeholders come to the party.
• I will feed back to them, cascading down the shower of ideas to drill down to a level of granularity.
• We will be living the values and achieving leverage up the strategic staircase, and taking a high altitude view so as not to wrongside the demographic.
• I will give 110%.

6. A willingness to be judged on results

• As someone who will in one fell swoop fill whatever diversity requirements you may have to meet as an organisation, I am used to being judged on appearance. Being judged on results makes a welcome change.

References on my commenting skills may be obtained from the following, a selection of whom I have interacted with on a daily basis for several months:

• Kingcricket (he was my first, gives the right answer to the question “cat or dog” and it still hurts a little to cheat on him here)
• Suave’s Republique (we were introduced by Kingcricket, then had a brief one-night stand where we indulged our forbidden love of hover-captions, but now he’s moved on to attacting other ladies through his wing-man FEC Naked Ali Cook)
• AYALAC (he likes to film it, and some of the stuff he does is barely legal. Likes to use toys and props)
• Miss Field (I’ve hardly flirted with female blogs before, but she tempted me where few others had succeeded)
• Well Pitched (can produce the goods four times a day)
• David Barry’s stats blog (I sullied his place with makeup the first time I visited)