One of the things that annoys me these days is to walk into a cricket ground and hear the noise coming from the field. It’s just ridiculous some of the things you hear. You see a bloke bowl a ball three feet outside off and everyone claps it and says, “Great line!” Great line? Hello? And you hear coaches saying, “Come on, boys, I want to hear some noise out there.” Well, the only noise I want to hear is stumps being knocked down.

The funniest thing you’ve seen on a cricket field?

Definitely the funniest thing I saw was in Rawalpindi, in Pakistan. Some bloke ran onto the field and he got chased by one of those policemen with a stick, a lathi. And this bloke was running flat-out, and the policeman had a fat tummy and he was never going to catch him, so he threw his lathi at him. And the stick bounced and bounced, and, just by luck, as the bloke threw his hand back the lathi landed in his hand. And, of course, when he brought his arm through and saw the lathi he didn’t know what to do … We were in the field watching all this and I just thought, well, that’s the most amazing thing I’ll ever see.

You’re currently in Dubai – what are you doing over there? Helping someone else work out how to beat the Aussies?

I’m director of coaching at the ICC Global Cricket Academy. It’s being built now at Dubai Sports City and it’s a massive project. When it’s finished we plan to have intakes from all over the world. We’ve got pitches from all over the world here – soil from Pakistan, from Western Australia, from Queensland, from England – so we can replicate different types of conditions. We’ve also got different conditions indoors: perfect batting pitches, fast bowling pitches and a couple of spinning pitches that double as four and five-day Asian pitches, where there’s very little bounce and you can get the ball to reverse very easily. It’s quite interesting.

Is this academy the end product of the Australian Cricket Academy you were involved in two decades ago?

Well yeah, it probably is. But we also want to use this facility as a research and development centre for technology in cricket. That’s the next big thing. So, for example, we’re trialling a brand-new bowling machine that’s just been developed by a friend of mine in NZ. I can’t tell you too much about it, but if it does what he says it does, then it might be the next big thing …