England cricket’s task after World Cup debacle is to focus on a new coach

There has been some sympathy for England’s Peter Moores and considerable debate over the causes of England’s early World Cup exit but nothing will really change without the right coach in place first

- Andy Bull
- theguardian.com, Tuesday 10 March 2015 10.18 EDT

Peter Moores and unhappy England players after being knocked out of the World Cup; the result makes him the least successful coach in England's history. Photograph: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images

ANOTHER FINE MESS

Around 1pm on Monday, 70 minutes or so after Rubel Hossain bowled Jimmy Anderson and England were knocked out of the World Cup, somebody logged on to Wikipedia and started to play around with the entry on “The Peter Principle”, the rule that says firms promote employees to the point of their own incompetence. No prizes for guessing what happened next. A quick tap of the keys and the second paragraph soon read: “The principle is named after Peter Moores, who co-authored with Paul Downton, James Whitaker and Giles Clarke the humorous 2015 debacle that was England’s catastrophic Cricket World Cup campaign.” A cruel joke, but not a bad one. Eleven months into his second stint in charge, it is clearer than ever that Peter Moores isn’t cut out to be England’s head coach.

Marina Hyde once wrote a good line about Roy Hodgson, which was that he had been appointed to manage fans’ expectations as much as players’ performances . Moores failed even in this, even though the bar was already set so low it was almost subterranean. Few expected England to make the semi-finals. Fewer still expected them to be knocked out before the pool stages were even over. This after the Ashes schedules were rearranged to ensure that they had a clear run into the competition, and they were afforded an early winter Tri-Series in Australia to ensure they had time to acclimatise to conditions. Another new low, then, for a team and their fans, who thought they had long since found rock bottom.

Despite his abject failure, there seems to be a measure of sympathy for Moores. Three reasons. The first is that many assume, rightly or wrongly, that he is a sacked man walking, and soon to be dismissed. The second is that he is an affable bloke, easy to get on with. And the third that he really does have some fine qualities as a coach. He led Sussex to their first-ever County Championship title, after 103 years, Lancashire to their first in 77, and he did a good job as the head of the ECB’s academy in between the two. In fact it was his very success in those roles that led him to be promoted up to the exact point where he began to seem out of his depth.

Moores also has a good eye for a promising player. Graeme Swann, Stuart Broad, Matt Prior and Chris Tremlett all made their Test debuts during his first spell in charge, so he can be said to have laid some of the foundations on which Andy Flower was able to build. I suspect he has done the same for his successor – assuming he is succeeded – this time, too, by picking Moeen Ali and Jos Buttler in the Test team and resuscitating the career of James Taylor, just as he once did that of Ryan Sidebottom. Moores would be an excellent man to have involved lower down the chain, as a selector perhaps, or back running the academy or overseeing youth development. Back, in fact, where the England and Wales Cricket Board once had him doing things he was good at.

But the same skills and philosophies that served him so well at county level seem to fail him when he is leading old hands in international cricket. Hard to imagine, for instance, that the England team would take well to arriving for pre-season to find Moores has laid-in a lot of pots of paint and that he wants them to touch up the ground, which is what once happened at Sussex. Of course, the really odd thing is that we already knew all this. The senior players who had worked with Moores, Swann, Kevin Pietersen, Andrew Strauss and Michael Vaughan, had all said as much, even if some of them also bought into the idea that he had changed his ways in the years in between. England have now madethis same mistake twice over.

Moores’ record first time around was played 73, won 29, lost 32, drawn 8. Add in his results in the last year (played 36, won 13, lost 21, drawn 2) and you find he now has the worst record of any of the four coaches the team have had, worse even than David Lloyd’s in the days before central contracts. Not only that, Moores’ record is, in fact, worse than those of every other current coach of a Test-playing nation. West Indies haven’t yet appointed a permanent replacement for Ottis Gibson, but the win/loss ratios of the eight remaining coaches range from 2.625 for Darren Lehmann down to 0.795 for Waqar Younis. Moores comes in just a lick below that at 0.792. Right now, “a look at the data”, to borrow the man’s own phrase, shows that judged by his win/loss ratio Moores is both the least successful coach in England’s history and the least successful coach on the international circuit.

Read that, and you may find your mind turns back to the press conference that the ECB managing director, Paul Downton, gave when he appointed Moores last April, in which he described him as “the outstanding coach of his generation”. And really, this is the central question in this whole sorry business: what kind of organisation would choose to appoint a man who has already failed at the very job they are hiring him to do?

That remark – “the outstanding coach of his generation” – seemed a foolish thing to say at the time, and has since turned out to be the first of a few comments that have made Downton seem either downright deluded or appallingly out of touch. Almost as though he has been working in a bank for the last 17 years. He was at it again on Monday. You can excuse his insistence that Eoin Morgan has “done a really good job” as England captain on the grounds that he was, at least, showing loyalty to his skipper (and Alastair Cook will tell you exactly how much that is worth).

But what to make of this assertion: “What has struck me has been how much influence T20 is having on one-day cricket and a lot of our players don’t play much T20 cricket so that is clearly something we have to look at. The big message from this World Cup has been you have to attack, you have to look to get wickets and you attack with the bat.” This stuff is beyond satire. (I mean: “Paul, the 1980s called and they want their strategies back”). Has it really taken this World Cup to teach England’s MD that T20 has changed the way ODI cricket is played? Did he really come into this World Cup believing that steady batting and defensive bowling would be enough to win England the title? If he did, what has he been doing for the last decade? And are we really going to spend the next four years acting on the lessons the MD thinks we were taught in the 2015 World Cup? How that is going to go down in 2019, I could never guess.

Other opinions are, of course, available. As Barney Ronay wrote last week, England are good at the blame game, and right now anyone searching for explanations is spoiled for choice. To his credit, the new ECB chairman Colin Graves has made it clear that he thinks every aspect of the English game is up for discussion. But where to start? Some say the players should take more responsibility for their own poor performances. Others think standards in the county game are not up to snuff. Some demand a streamlined T20 competition to hothouse talent. Others think it is a broader issue still, that English cricket gives too much weight to Test cricket. Each of those arguments has its own counter-argument. And some of them sound eerily familiar. After England were knocked out in 2011, Andy Flower said the team “were very tentative” and had “played with fear”. Which sounds a lot like the lines Brian Rose, a member of the Schofield review panel, used in 2007, when he said “other sides are more aggressive. We don’t seem to have taken the game forward in comparison.”

There are so many opinions flying around, but only one set really matters – those held by England’s next coach. Writing in the Times on Tuesday Mike Atherton argues that this is “a wrong-headed way of looking at the game”, that the “cult of the coach” encourages players to “shirk responsibility for performance”. There is truth in that. But it is true, too, that a good coach doesn’t allow his players to shirk responsibility. The coach is the most important influence on the culture of the team, especially for a side like England, who – absurd as this seems after what has just happened – actually have plenty of inexperienced but talented players to pick, from Buttler, Ali, Joe Root, and Gary Ballance through to Ben Stokes, Chris Woakes, and Chris Jordan, on to Jason Roy, Sam Billings, and James Vince.

Get the coach right, and you’ll find a lot of things start to fall into place, a fact never better illustrated than in the difference Darren Lehmann made to the Australia team when he took over from Mickey Arthur. It was only 18 months ago that Australia lost a Test series 4-0 to India and finished bottom of their group in the Champions Trophy. And their squad for that competition included ten of the players who are in the squad again now. Remember, too, that until Lehmann took over the national team, Australian cricket was also suffering from a surfeit of opinions about what was wrong; that some blamed the coach, some the captain, and others the culture, some felt the Big Bash was at fault, that the first class talent stream had dried up, that the pitches were encouraging poor techniques, that current generation was overrated, over-promoted and overpaid.

None of which seems to matter quite so much now that, under Lehmann’s stewardship, the team have started winning again. No doubt there are aspects of the culture and structure of English cricket that need to be addressed. But let’s not make this too complicated: the first thing needed is the best possible coach for the national team. No doubt the right candidate will be hard to find, given that many contenders are content to work in the IPL instead. So the ECB also needs to find the right people to run the interview and selection process. Alternatively, it could just leave it up to the same people all over again. Call it the RePeter Principle.

WIN! WIN! WIN!

If, like The Spin, you’ve ever been press-ganged into umpiring a competitive match, and if, like The Spin, you’ve ever found yourself telling an irate batsman: “Don’t argue with the umpire, don’t argue with the umpire,” because you’ve given him out, your mind has gone blank and the only bit of the Laws you can remember is the line that says: “An umpire’s decision, once made, is final,” then listen up. Robbie Book, director of The Club Cricket Conference, has written the book for you. It’s called The Reluctant Umpire, a lovely little guide on “how to umpire a club cricket match, survive your team-mates and not lose your friends”, and it’s slim enough to fit in your coat pocket.

It costs £9.99, and should be an essential part of every club’s kit. Better yet, all the proceeds are going to The Cricket Club Charity, which funds all manner of aspects of the amateur game. You can buy a copy here. The Spin also has three signed copies to give away. To win one, all you have to do is answer this conundrum:

“You’ve been roped in to stand as umpire in a club match. The batsman slaps the ball high into the air towards cow corner. There’s a fielder hurrying along underneath it to try and take the catch. He’s not going to get there. But then, just as the ball is about to fly over the rope, it hits a passing pigeon. The bird falls down to the ground, dead. The ball follows it down and lands flush in the hands of the fielder just inside the boundary rope. The fielding team appeal. What’s the correct decision?”

Email your answers to me at andy.bull@theguardian.com and make sure to put ‘Reluctant Umpire’ in the subject line. I’ll pick the winners out next week.

QUOTE OF THE WEEK

“Prisoners need recreation for a healthy mind” – Arup Kumar Goswami, Justice of the Guwahati high court, explains why he has ordered a local prison to install cable TV connections so that inmates can watch the World Cup. Goswami was upholding a public interest litigation brought before the court by seven men incarcerated at Guwahati central jail. The inmates argued that they were being denied their constitutional “right to life and personal liberty” because the TV in the prison common room only picked up the Doordarshan channel and not Star TV, so they were unable to watch most of the matches.

STILL WANT MORE?

Two rare treats, as a couple of the finest writers at the Guardian dip into cricket. Scott Murray, mindful of England’s performances in other sports, is utterly un
surprised by the ineptitude of the cricket team. And Marina Hyde traces the parallels between those two towering figures of modern English history, Kevin Pietersen and Maggie Thatcher. (If you don’t get the joke, it’s on you).

Five takes on what’s gone wrong with English cricket and how to fix it: one from Mike Selvey, another from Barney Ronay, and one each from Owais Shah, Bob Willis, and Derek Pringle.

After all that, you may well find yourself longing for something sweet to take the sour taste away. So: Steve Pye, of That 1980s Sports Blog, with his 11 favourite 80s World Cup moments, and in a piece extracted from the latest Nightwatchman magazine, John Crace describes his friendship with Wasim and Waqar.