Allister de Winter leaves Cricket Australia role

One of the few remaining vestiges of the Mickey Arthur era has departed Cricket Australia, with bowling coach Allister de Winter going his separate ways from the team after his former role was gradually taken up by the return and subsequent promotion of Craig McDermott.

A former Tasmania bowling coach, de Winter had interviewed for the role of bowling coach in mid-2011 but was overlooked, before taking on the job fulltime a year later as part of the support staff overseen by Arthur when his predecessor and sometime rival McDermott resigned following the end of the 2012 West Indies tour.

Between then and the end of the 2013 Ashes tour, de Winter served as chief mentor for Australia's pace bowlers, who enjoyed some success at home but struggled notably on tours of England and India in 2013, culminating in the "homework" suspensions of four players in Mohali.

McDermott worked with the pacemen again in the lead-up to the Ashes in England, and while de Winter oversaw the unit that began to unearth weaknesses in the batting order of Alastair Cook's side during the course of that series, the new coach Darren Lehmann had begun to look further afield for other options.

McDermott was re-hired to work with the Test team at the outset of the home Ashes series, during which the outstanding combination of Mitchell Johnson, Ryan Harris and Peter Siddle confounded the English tourists. Following an underwhelming World Twenty20 campaign in Bangladesh, de Winter was sidelined further from his limited-overs coaching role when McDermott was promoted to assistant coach across all formats in mid-2014.

"Ali is no longer working with the Australian team," the team performance manager Pat Howard told the Age. "He played a valuable role supporting our bowlers from 2012. He finished on very good terms and the door remains open to him working with us again in the future."

Echoing Howard's words, de Winter said there was nothing acrimonious about his exit. "I thoroughly enjoyed my time working with the Australian team over the past two and a half years," he said. "I'm pursuing other career opportunities in a number of areas, including cricket. I remain on good terms with everyone involved in the game."

Other members of team support staff to either depart or changes roles since Lehmann replaced Arthur have included the strength and conditioning coach David Bailey and the fielding coach Steve Rixon, replaced by Damian Mednis and Greg Blewett respectively.