"No task for the faint-hearted,” was how Gary Kirsten, the former South Africa batsman, described touring India in 1996 before going on to complain, in the usual patronising way, about “hotel socialisation” and bad food. Now, as India prepares to host Australia in Bangalore today at the start of a four-Test series, Kirsten is the India coach. If his previous disparagement was wide of the mark, few would describe his present role as a stroll in the maidan. For outsiders, coaching India or Pakistan has proved to be a tough job.

Despite the difficulties, it has become a well-trodden path. Kirsten is the third consecutive non-Indian to coach the national team, after John Wright and Greg Chappell. Geoff Lawson, the coach of Pakistan, followed Richard Pybus and Bob Woolmer. All have been attracted by the challenge, the kudos and, if the sum is accurate in Kirsten's case, the money. Success has eluded most, Wright having the best claims to a successful tenure, including leading India to the 2003 World Cup final. Most die a death; figuratively in, say, Chappell's case, literally in Woolmer's.

The challenge of coaching these sub-continental teams differs, but the difficulties suggest that those, such as Chappell, who try to change radically the cricketing culture and mould it to either their own will or the Western ideal of how a professional team should function are doomed to fail. As Kirsten embarks this morning upon his biggest series as India coach, it is a lesson he would do well to understand.

Pybus could not cope with the irrationality and the uncertainty of Pakistan cricket. Using an unfortunate analogy, given the present situation, he said this of his time there: “They have an amazing capacity to ambush themselves ... you're always sitting there waiting for someone to lob a hand grenade and waiting for it to go off. You can never plan with such a team because you don't know what is happening tomorrow.” Dismissed twice, Pybus urged Pakistan to take a more scientific - meaning Western - approach to their cricket.

Woolmer may have been better placed than Pybus to cope with the increasingly Islamist outlook of the post-match-fixing Pakistan team under Inzamam-ul-Haq because Woolmer's South Africa side were the most overtly religious of the Western teams. Indeed, he was sanguine about the religious orthodoxy of the majority of his players, the prayers before, during and after play and the adherence to Ramadan; it was the unpredictable nature of their cricket that he could not understand.

The stress of coaching a team who lost to Ireland, as Pakistan did in the 2007 World Cup, was too much for him, especially because, unlike the mid-1990s, when match-fixing was rife, there was no evidence that Pakistan lost the match for financial gain. Coaching Pakistan was, sadly, Woolmer's last job; a lonely hotel room in Jamaica his last port of call.

India presents different problems, in so much as it is not the unpredictability that challenges a coach, but the lack of it. Chappell wanted to modernise Indian ways and challenge what he saw as a cosy club of ageing, unathletic stars. But anyone who wants to challenge the status quo must remember that it is the players in India who call the shots. Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Sourav Ganguly are icons, wealthy and revered beyond measure, and used to playing on their terms or not at all.

At the end of his five years coaching in India, Wright reflected on his experiences in his book, Indian Summers. He recalled one of his first training sessions, how the players got off the team bus, leaving their kit for porters to take to the nets, how they sat in wicker armchairs while tea and biscuits were brought and how “when they did go for a run they set a pace that a tortoise with a double hip replacement would have found comfortable”. Post-independence cricket, the maharaja way. Wright allowed his princes to continue to run their fiefdoms, working the system rather than fighting it.

Chappell found this unacceptable and tried to remove the person he felt was the biggest obstacle to change: Ganguly. A power struggle ensued, one that the outsider, no matter how great a player he was or how good a coach, was bound to lose. Ganguly had friends in high places, notably Jagmohan Dalmiya, a former president of the Board of Control for Cricket in India (BCCI), the Lalit Modi of his day. This morning, despite not having scored a Test hundred for 20 innings, Ganguly prepares to take his place against Australia alongside Dravid, Tendulkar and V.V.S. Laxman in a middle order that has remained unchanged for a decade. On Tuesday, Ganguly announced that this series will be his last. He will go out on his terms.

As a player, Kirsten was more like Wright than Chappell: doughty, tough, but not brilliantly talented. In character, too, he appears more Wright than Chappell, more obviously friendly and clubbable, more adaptable, less egotistical. He has already had his wings clipped by the BCCI: it did not take kindly to his suggestion that Mahendra Singh Dhoni may be ready for the Test captaincy and it has stopped him writing about his Indian experiences on his website. Kirsten has acquiesced.

When it comes to coaching India or Pakistan, there is a wrong way and a Wright way: keep your friends close and your enemies even closer.

Peter Chingoka's official role is a surprise

Press releases can be a bit of a bore, clogging up e-mail accounts and wasting valuable time. During the summer, for example, the ECB's media department felt the need to tell us that Anya Shrubsole, the 16-year-old England women's cricketer from Bath, scored two A*s and nine As in her GCSE exams, a fine achievement, no doubt, the trumpeting of which gave rise to the suspicion that there are too many people at Lord's with too little to do.

On Monday, though, a press release arrived that was dripping with such sweet irony that the only conclusion to draw was that it represented a deliberate attempt by the ICC to banish the start-of-the-week blues.

On the face of it, the release had a harmless enough title: “Make-up of ICC committees”, it said, which on a scale of one to ten in mouth-watering invitations to read ranks pretty low. (The literary equivalent was published last month: Alastair Cook: Starting Out - My Story So Far.)

Those who took the trouble to do so, however, were richly rewarded. For there, under the heading “Governance Review Committee”, was the name of the Zimbabwean representative, Peter Chingoka.

The Governance Review Committee investigates issues relating to corporate governance, so the minutes of these meetings could make for far more interesting reading than any anodyne press release.

On Zimbabwe, Chingoka could be asked why no accounts of Zimbabwe Cricket (ZC) have been published since 2005, or why the ICC's own audit of ZC's finances uncovered deliberate falsification to mask illegal transactions, or why it concluded that it was not possible to rely on the authenticity of the balance sheet. Or, why has KPMG's independent audit of ZC's finances not been released?

His colleagues might ask why, despite the millions of dollars pocketed by ZC over the past few years, Zimbabwe's cricketing infrastructure has all but collapsed. Or, why were a number of life presidents of ZC unconstitutionally stripped of their positions a year ago before they could cause trouble at the AGM?

No doubt, despite the ICC's mission statement to provide “openness, honesty and integrity” and work to the “highest ethical standards”, these minutes, just like the KPMG audit, will not be released. When Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1973 Tom Lehrer, the American humorist, famously noted the death of political satire; Chingoka keeping a seat warm on the Governance Review Committee is the cricketing equivalent.