Andrew Strauss

Esperanto

LordCanisLupus122 Comments

Bilious Inadequates

Which one makes more sense to you?

The last year has been a period of transition and rebuilding in which Peter has nurtured new talent, developed new players and laid the foundations for the new coaching structure to build on.
“This decision has been made as we focus on the future and our need to build the right approach and deliver success over the next five years within a new performance structure.”

or this…

La lasta jaro estis periodo de transiro kaj rekonstruo en kiu Peter nutriĝas nova talento , evoluigis novajn ludantojn kaj fondis por la nova trejnisto strukturo por konstrui sur .
‘ Tiu decido estis farita kiel ni enfokusigi sur la estonteco kaj nia bezono por konstrui la dekstra alproksimiĝo kaj savos sukceson dum la venontaj kvin jaroj ene de nova agado strukturo .

Because it doesn’t make any sense to me. I weep when I see this sort of thing. The implication is that Moores has done a good job developing talent that they needed after the loss of the Ashes and the key players who walked, were injured/ill or just chucked out for reasons not explained, but now it needs to be left to the big boys, like Andrew, who knows best. The only way this could get better is if they re-appoint Andy Flower as coach.

More on all this later. It’s a lovely sunny day by the Shore and we have visitors coming so probably won’t be around much more today.

UPDATE – Vaughan’s piece in the Telegraph, if true, is astonishing – http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/cricket/international/england/11594878/ECBs-handling-of-Peter-Moores-sacking-was-disgraceful.html

I had talks with the ECB about the director of cricket job the day after the Grenada Test when the team had won and there was a vibe about England’s Test cricket. It was clear to me that they would not be removing Peter from his job and I felt I could not be the boss of someone I did not rate.

It would have created too much pressure around the team and too much focus would have been on that relationship leading into a huge Ashes series.

There was also the Kevin Pietersen situation. That was always going to be hard to manage. I personally wouldn’t want to rule him out of playing for England again if he scores runs for Surrey and a vacancy opens up in the middle order. If his game is good enough why would you not want to take someone like that to a World Twenty20 next March? But the ECB still seem to be a little bit reluctant to bring him back and I feel that the Pietersen issue is still going to be a talking point through the summer. So it was not the right time for me and I was never offered it anyway.

But then the situation changed. England lost in Barbados and Peter’s job was on the line again. It is a warning of how quickly things can move on in sport.

Where do you start with that? I have not mentioned KP that much recently but this indicates there is still no desire AT ALL for KP, meaning he has been led up the garden path as I thought.  How one match (Barbados) changed everything with a body that talks about “long-term” strategy and building structures. How Moores was staying, then going. In a blink of an eye.

I mean, it’s enough to inspire zealotry in anyone, isn’t it?

Dis-Appointment

LordCanisLupus9 Comments

Strauss Motivator

So it has been confirmed by the usual type of press release where those doing the appointing try to persuade us that this has been an exhuastive and thorough process, where after enormous efforts, they’ve got the right man.

Like this one:

“Paul’s experience of a World Cup final, Ashes success, six County Championship wins and 58 international appearances for England provides a wealth of cricket experience.

“His background in law when coupled with his experience in the City provides the unique set of skills which is required to lead and manage the England Cricket Department’s £100m budget over the next four years.”

Still make me chuckle. The “outstanding candidate indeed”.

Today it has been announced, not with the hoopla of a press conference that you’d associate a major announcement like this to have given the high profile nature of the job (Downton’s post wasn’t making news like this one is), but via a press release, that Andrew Strauss is now the Director of Cricket. Let’s take the release in full first.

“Andrew Strauss has been appointed Director, England Cricket. In this new high-performance role for the England & WalesCricket Board [ECB] he will be responsible for the long-term strategy of the England men’s cricket team and for developing the right coaching and management structure to support it.

“The appointment follows a month-long formal recruitment process led by ECB chief executive Tom Harrison. Strauss, who led England to two Ashes wins and took his team to the top of the ICC world Test rankings, reports to the chief executive.

“Commenting on the appointment, Harrison said: ‘Andrew’s breadth of ideas, his passion for England cricket and his proven leadership skills shone out. He was an exceptional England captain, is an authoritative voice on the modern game and has a wealth of experience building successful teams.

“‘Andrew’s also widely respected across the sporting landscape. We’re delighted he’s joining us at the ECB as we set out to create a new strategy for the game.’

“In this new role Strauss will oversee the England’s senior men’s team including their performance and development programmes and the selection process and player pathway. The England Head Coach will report directly to him.”

There’s more wooliness than a sheep farm, more platitudes than a showbiz awards show, and more guff than listening to the reporters on the TMS slot (sorry chaps! needed something). First up we have “long-term strategy”.

This is the refuge of people who have no idea how to make a success. Long-term strategy and development of the right structures of management etc. A little bit of me died. What does this mean? What is long-term, and what structures are we on about when for the England cricket team, it seems to be in place now (or are we talking about Andrew cutting down/increasing support staff). How is Strauss going to get star players out of the ether if none exist?

The second paragraph mentions a month long formal process to reach the decision. The job plan wasn’t made public, the interviews seem to consist of Michael Vaughan having a chat and saying that the job wasn’t for him, and Andrew Strauss saying it was. Perhaps the ECB might enlighten us poor plebs as to what this process was, who else might have been approached, and what they might think of the role? Did they speak to Alec Stewart for instance, or did they approach Martyn Moxon? Instead, it seems to this bilious inadequate that we’ve designed a job in the England team called “Being Andrew Strauss”.

Now, I’m not impressed at all by Tom Harrison so far. I’m sure he doesn’t even have the likes of us on his radar. The next few comments he makes are straight out of the management appointment bullshit lexicon that drives me up the wall. The “he’s really great and we’re so lucky to have him” bollocks that sets my antennae off, and makes me immediately suspicious.

Andrew’s breadth of ideas, his passion for England cricket and his proven leadership skills shone out. He was an exceptional England captain, is an authoritative voice on the modern game and has a wealth of experience building successful teams.

Seriously, what are these ideas? He reads management and armed forces guides and implements some of their ideas. This worked well because one of his best batsmen wandered a mile off the reservation under him, and while it’s too easy to say it was all that man’s fault, you had to be blind not to see the cliques emerging, especially the Swann Anderson nexus which got to include Broad. So count me sceptical about his record on that. He captained England very well when we got on top and scored big runs.

As for the last bit, please spare me. An authoritative voice? Really. What’s the most memorable thing he has said since he left the England set-up? If that’s authoritative, we’re in for a fun time. I’m also not sure that the last bit was bang-on, but the players mostly seemed to like him. But once the team came off the rails, it did so with a bang, so he had experience of seeing one fall apart too.

“‘Andrew’s also widely respected across the sporting landscape. We’re delighted he’s joining us at the ECB as we set out to create a new strategy for the game.’

Pure management-speak bollocks. Set out to create a new strategy for the game. Seriously, what does that mean? When I have a work objective set it has to be SMART. My eyes roll at that. Time specific? Measurable? Specific? No, woolly management guff you can kick down the road because extraneous factors will always get in the way. Oh yes, and the first bit. I’m sure he’s widely respected across the sporting landscape, but funny how the bilious inadequates think he’s the “safe” choice, the “company” man, the assured diplomat and just the sort of family they’d like to see a DOC come from.

“In this new role Strauss will oversee the England’s senior men’s team including their performance and development programmes and the selection process and player pathway. The England Head Coach will report directly to him.”

Does this mean he becomes a selector, or replaces Whitaker? This is the interesting part because it was this role that Downton seemed to take that alarmed us all. Also, how do you oversee the performance if you’re not the coach, and how is he supposed to influence it?

I genuinely don’t think they know what they want Andrew Strauss to do except be Andrew Strauss. We all have our views on him, and mine are on the slightly unfavourable but not downright hostile. I see him as a reasonably set in his ways, typical establishment manager, with adherence to major principles and too keen a take on text book management tomes. If he’s allowed to kick the can down the road, he is going to, because he’s already known as “bob the Builder” on here for his insistence on taking long-term approaches and building for the future, when the team he led was as conservative and for the time as you could get. It wasn’t exactly known for developing talent. It also was a team that had its way of winning. The infamous “bowling dry” which worked if you made masses of runs, which we did.

Of course, there are major elephants in the room. KP will always loom. Calling him a you know what will always be remembered, and the biggest of them all, his attitude to Cook and probably more importantly Flower loom. I think he sees kindred spirits in those two, and if that’s the case, I can’t be positive. We need to be released from the shackles of the past, not be beholden to it.

These will be outstanding times indeed.

Assembly

LordCanisLupus172 Comments

The aftermath of the tour continues and eyes turn towards the futures of the top table. Those eyes are cast more in the direction of the coach, Peter Moores, and when you read some of the stuff coming out, it’s no surprise.

Moores has to carry a number of burdens, partly of his own making, and partly a little unfair. I have not been inside a dressing room at professional level, but even at club level, you know when people don’t think you are credible, don’t listen to what you do, don’t care about your future. It’s not fair that Moores never played international cricket, and that will always count against him when it comes to motivating and coaching great international players. However, he has been on the county treadmill and knows it inside out, and will be a great county coach again when this ends. He commands respect of the county pros, but maybe lacks a little at the top level with the senior pros. Maybe. It’s guess work, but I’ve seen enough football managers lose that respect, and I can recognise some of the problems. At this stage, with a young core of players, Moores can bring them along, as long as he retains the support of the key senior pros. These being Cook, Bell, Broad and Anderson, and to a lesser degree, the next in line, Joe Root. All have played every game under Moores, and there is no hint of this changing any time soon.

The second cross he has to bear is that he lacks credibility among much of the watching public. James Morgan on TFT makes the analogy perfectly – would the England national team go back to Steve McClaren, or would the rugby team go back to Andy Robinson. Both were assistants under more successful coaches who never bridged the credibility gap with the public, probably unfairly. Moores, like it or not, comes across as a nice guy out of his depth at this level. I’m not, like some, going to assign some malevolent motive to his tenure on his behalf. He’s been thrown a hell of a challenge after the Ashes 2013-14, made even harder by the idiotic jettisoning of Kevin Pietersen (not for his absence from the team, but because of the messages it sent) and he has developed some of the younger players (although not greatly, not really). The sense remains though, as the World Cup campaign showed, that Moores is not up to key elements of the job. He will present a case, but the evidence is not backing it up. Combine an abject disaster in the World Cup with a home loss to Sri Lanka in all formats, and coughing up a 1-0 lead in the Caribbean, and there is not a lot to say “keep me on” other than some sort of hope for a change of fortune. My football team did that this season, and by the time we sacked our manager it was too late to save them, despite the best efforts of a new manager who did really well.

Which brings us to the third problem, and this one was partly of his own making, but more of that champion of champions Paul Downton. Peter Moores applied for a job and got it and accepted terms no manager/coach should ever do. That is, be told who he could not have in his team under any circumstances. You anti-KP fans keep making it about him if you want, but the message this sends to any player is profound. Be independently minded, have a strong opinion about your game, and how you want your career to pan out, and that could happen to you. It wasn’t a good start. Then, to have your appointment accompanied by the “greatest coach of his generation” comment by Downton was just amazing. Moores would have been completely at liberty to tell the MD to shut his hole, because that was going to stick. If he could not put before the public a set of results to live up to that billing, he was going to be ridiculed. So it has proved.

The final problem for Moores is his inability to speak, or appear to speak, in anything other than management tones. He sounds like a first year MBA student more than a cricket coach. Sport is about maximising the analytical tools to hand (I’m reading a fascinating book on baseball analysis at the moment) but it is also about unquantifiable exploits. You don’t find Jimmy Anderson’s fifth day morning session in any text book. You have that seize the day approach, the raising of the game to higher planes which can’t be factored in. If they were, sport would be bloody dull and we’d all not bother to watch it. But it’s too much process this, learning lessons that.

I’ll tell you another thing that doesn’t help, and it’s a warm welcome to a Paul Newman quote on here after at least a couple of weeks absence, is nonsense like this:

To watch England here has been to see a highly promising group who respect their coach and want to succeed for him and I believe Moores should be given that crack at the Ashes denied him in 2009 by another Kevin Pietersen-inspired controversy.

Just read that and weep. No player is going to come out in the open and say Moores shouldn’t be coach. KP did that and got fired as captain. KP said that about Flower and was booted out for it. There’s not a lot of longevity in showing you aren’t playing for the coach. I’d say we need to win more games to show how well we are playing for Moores, instead of going overboard over one win in Grenada. But Newman doesn’t let it go with his bete noire, who he is now getting all tin foil hat over. KP has the square root of eff all to do with Moores staying on as coach. Pietersen has not scored the runs required of him by Graves et al for starters. Second, KP is not responsible for Moores performance in the job thus far, so is a total utter irrelevance about whether Moores should stay in the job. Third, we’ve been down this long service award drivel before (he deserves a crack at the Ashes – if he deserved it in 2009, he’d have made an unanswerable case instead of losing home series in 2007 and 2008) and that worked in the World Cup. Also, Newman’s changed his tune. He was really down on Moores after the World Cup. Maybe Cook’s told him to lay off or something.

I feel a bit for Moores, to be honest. I actually think he’s a really decent man giving it his all, but he doesn’t really stand a chance. It may be, like before, he’s laying down the foundations for someone else, but also there’s the suspicion that this is as far as he can go. While it is hard to ignore the fact he took the job on compromised terms, he has not been the hate figure some portray him to be. He’s more a figure of sympathy, and in international sport, that is often much, much worse. If this best case you can make to keep him on is he deserves his go at the Ashes because he got sacked before, then you are not making a convincing case.

I thought I’d concentrate more on Moores in this piece, but do a brief bit on Cook and Strauss before longer thought pieces.

Cook has been the subject of a vicious attack by Boycott in the Telegraph. I wonder how Cook will approach Jonathan Agnew about that. Cook doesn’t take kindly to being spoken about like that and the consequences could be interesting. Boycott is a loudmouth, paid to express loud opinions, and you take them as they come. But I’ve never seen him this aggravated by a captain / player ever. This was going for the throat. I would say that it’s not as easy to dismiss Boycott’s views that align with a lot of us outside cricket, than it is for them to slate me, but they try (he’s a wife beater, he quit on England, blah blah – he also faced top quicks at 90 mph without a helmet on). A lot of us believe Cook isn’t the nice guy that his image is portrayed as, but I want to get away from that part. I want to look at the evidence – it’s all I try to do, and try to interpret. He’s protected, for now, and could jettison Moores to keep his career in check. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

As for Strauss…. appointing him the new Director of Cricket would be Downtonian in its brilliance. He talks the language of all charlatans – promising to build for a non-specific future, while using this to move on from something else that he doesn’t like (in this case a player who might return to form and demand selection). He also has the cult of Cook in his playbook, and would be an establishment, company candidate when root and branch change to a more exciting, attractive style of play is going to be needed. This current England team still has dedicated fans and lovers of the game actively wanting them, or key members of them, to fail to get the changes needed in structure, attitude and approach. Bringing back Mr Bowling Dry, with his foster son as captain and his foster dad wheeling away behind the scenes, is spitting in the face of those who actively want to love this side again. Strauss is typical ECB. Unexciting, not credible and the wrong man. More of this later.

Pressure

LordCanisLupus100 Comments

Thank you for all the nice comments on the Infamy post. I actually wanted to start a discussion on some of the points raised in the piece in Wisden rather than go for all that praise stuff. I don’t do this for praise.

Since I wrote it I’ve had a piece in my mind about the press and blogs. I am under no illusions. The vast majority of journos who read this blog, and I know a few do, probably think I am what Andrew Strauss called Kevin Pietersen. I get that. I’m not exactly coming to them in an attitude of peace and tranquility. I want to try to hold them to account. Believe me, I know many of the issues that confronts them, I’m not daft. The modern press is also, in many ways, a completely different animal to even 10 years ago. Everyone is a critic, everyone has a voice, and the digital age means clicks and hits drive a lot of the reporting, and time pressures mean deadlines and holding stories back is much more difficult. It’s a modern world, and even I can’t keep up.

The modern media includes podcasts, discussions and analysis of output. To that end, let’s take a look at the podcast on the Lord’s site that some of you pointed me to. I want to refer to it to set up some of the issues for later in the piece.

I’ve listened to a good deal of the Lord’s podcast where Strauss, in my mind, proves his complete unsuitability for the new role in the England line-up. No, it’s not about KP, but it’s about the line about “building towards the 2019 Ashes”. There’s a bloody World Cup in the intervening period, at home. There’s a World T20 in India (?) and a Champions Trophy in England. There’s also other exciting test series against the likes of mercurial Pakistan, difficult South Africa and other such match-ups. We concentrate on the Ashes?

A tweeter on my LCL feed pointed out in response to my “how did building go this winter” pointing out that we did not play test cricket. Of course, I meant how did building to this World Cup, by agreeing to mess the Ashes series about, clearing the decks of test cricket and playing ODIs almost exclusively since the end of August go in building to that aim? I couldn’t get that in 140 characters, so did it here. And that’s the point, just because you have some nebulous concept of “building” towards something, doesn’t mean we will do it. I recall a podcast on 5 Live before we went to Australia in 2013 and Flower was most assuredly building towards that. This is a vacuuous concept, one I want no part of. There are far too many good teams, far too much cricket to be played, rightly or wrongly, to try to get away with saying its OK to lose, and OK to exclude KP, as long as it is in the greater good to winning the Ashes in 2019. What a load of old baloney.

I’ve gone off on a little bit of a tangent, but stick with me. Strauss said that building line, ostensibly to justify not recalling KP post this summer. He earlier said the way to end the KP business was “winning games”. With all due respect Andrew, I’m calling baloney on that too. First of all, building towards something indicates winning in the present is not as high a priority as winning in the future, yet there’s a need to win matches now. I have no idea how those two aims aren’t opposed. And you see, Andrew, we’ve been there. The press told us this after we won against India, with a great comeback, runs for Cook, the bowling looking good, and the new players looking the part. But it hasn’t stuck. Because while you and your ilk are concentrating on this being all about KP, you miss the point. You always miss the point.

Outside cricket? No apology. Full explanation for not picking a team on merit and excluding a talented player? Not forthcoming. Communication with supporters who might be disgruntled at this lack of decency towards them? Pipe down, move on, not at a low ebb. Giles Clarke showed this week how he approaches those who dared criticise and that attitude permeated down the ECB and whether the press cared, had the appetite, or the need to fight on our behalf while also putting the case for termination of KP is for them to tell us. We did not see it.

Here comes that line in Brian’s piece about not being as understanding of the press position:

But the press coverage reflected, in part, the vulnerabilities of cricket journalists, who have a symbiotic relationship with administrators and players: the administrators grant access to the players, who provide interviews and quotes. Most bloggers have no such privileges, yet this very freedom from professional dependence means they can shoot from the hip.

Brian makes our point. The journalists may not have agreed with what was going on, but they didn’t want to risk not getting access (Mark makes this point in the comments too). I’m well aware of this. I know journalists are sick to death of the sponsored interview, and I know the player/press relationship is always a fraught one. So when we take the next logical step that some of them were showing rather too much glee at the dismissal of KP and by extension adopting a selection policy on something other than form or ability, that they had become extensions of the organisation we were so angry at, were we really out of line? Perception is important. The big beast appearances on the Agnew press round up, or on Cricket Writers, became an exercise on putting out the ECB line more often than not. The rush out of press conference to proclaim the KP matter closed, the ability of the empty suit in front of them, or the inevitability of Cook’s return to form was peeled back in an instant. They now sit there thinking KP’s PR team has won the battle, and in the same breath say his book was a disaster. They miss the point totally.

What has, I think, made them really uncomfortable isn’t the lack of access should they side with the great unwashed, but that the great unwashed simply aren’t listening and WILL NOT BE TOLD. I’ve said many times that KP isn’t the issue now, it really isn’t. It’s the ECB and pretty much always has been. It’s the way the press have leaned their way, by and large, and certainly in the immediate aftermath, that’s the issue too. Sure, I would like to see KP play for England again. What I want to see most is a team picked on merit and form. That would mean that England’s openers on Monday should probably be Lyth and Trott out of that squad, and not Cook. This makes me anti-Cook because I’m pro-KP. I’m anti a test opening bat who hasn’t made a test hundred in nearly two years, and has looked all at sea. A century or two in the West Indies does not prove the opposite. It merely proves that some people are picked for memories, not on evidence. Some people are picked because they are from the right kind of family. We did not see that challenged enough. As I said, in some cases, there was a little too much glee.

To me the acid test has been the attitude towards Andy Flower. I see very few pieces bemoaning his overwhelming presence still. I see little questioning his role in the collapse of 2013/14. I see very few pieces questioning if this is of great benefit. Instead it is the greatest coach stuff, world number 1, world T20 winners. Dobell gets it, and his back-seat driver quote last Spring was quite good in capturing the fear. But the press just said it was a good thing, we couldn’t lose his massive skills, and even called impertinent when questioning why he was talking to the Chairman of Selectors. This doesn’t require an understanding of the role of the journalist. It is asking questions that might need to be asked. Flower’s choice to remain silent has never been portrayed as anything other than “dignified”. I feel a little short changed. He played a massive role in what went wrong, it appears he sealed Pietersen’s fate, and then got a job he lobbied for. I think he needed to speak, don’t you?

I’ve done my usual old long-winded piece, and I’m not sure it went anywhere. That’s my prerogative, of course. A journalist has to tighten up, show skills in brevity, be able to convey things in a rapid way. He also has access, he has contacts (and she, of course, because there are very good female journalists out there) and he has a job many of us would love. I think they take this too personally at times. Yes, I’m pretty scathing, but I am because I am angry, and so are you. A faint heart never won a fair maiden and all that.

So while Strauss can babble on about winning shutting us up, he is wrong. The rate of anger went up when we beat India, not down. It seemed to be a reason to brush Sri Lanka under the carpet, and dispose of Pietersen, and it wasn’t fooling me. If Strauss can’t figure out why that win didn’t have us piping down, then he’s not worthy to be Director of Cricket. You aren’t dealing with stupid people here, and we have a voice. A small one, but one that seems to get noticed.

Have a great evening.