Strauss tipped for England’s plum job
ANDREW Strauss will be appointed England’s director of cricket in a matter of days, and his first task will be to decide on the future of Peter Moores.
Moores is close to the exit as England coach after failing to meet the minimum demand set by Colin Graves, the incoming chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board, of winning the series in the West Indies. It may be a poor return too far for Moores, who also presided over a disastrous World Cup held in Australia and New Zealand recently.
A decision on the coach will have to be made quickly, with the two-Test series against New Zealand due to start at Lord’s on May 21.
Moores will be fearing the worst, given that Strauss has criticised his methods and wrote in his autobiography last year that, during Moores’s first stint as coach, he suffocated the players with too much information.
“What is required at the highest level is a coach who is able to calm players down, allowing them to play to their strengths – Moores’s philosophy that ‘energy cannot be saved, it can only be created’ ran contrary to that,” Strauss wrote in his book, Driving Ambition.
Moores will be hoping that Strauss takes his time over the decision, giving him the summer to prove that he has learnt from the past and built a better relationship this time around with both senior and junior players.
Strauss is much closer to Alastair Cook, his former opening partner, which shores up the latter’s position as captain. Cook’s form returned in the West Indies, with his first century for nearly two years in the final Test in Barbados, and it remains a reality for England that there is no reliable alternative within the team who has the necessary experience to take on Australia this summer.
For Moores it is different, with many coaches around the world attracted to a highly lucrative job. Changing the coach is also potentially not as disruptive as sacking a captain, as proved by Australia’s removal of Mickey Arthur just weeks before the summer Ashes series in 2013. Australia lost the series but Darren Lehmann quickly revitalised the team’s fortunes.
Lehmann’s fellow South Australian, Jason Gillespie, the director of cricket at Yorkshire, will be favourite to coach England if Moores is sacked.
At the weekend, Gillespie turned down an approach from South Australia, a move that would have meant returning to live in Australia and would have ruled him out of the England job.
Strauss became the favourite for the director-of-cricket role as soon as Michael Vaughan told the ECB last week that he was no longer interested in the job after talks with Tom Harrison, the board’s chief executive.
Harrison returns tomorrow from a break to New York and is expected to confirm Strauss’s appointment as the ECB looks to begin the process of change within the England team.
Vaughan and Strauss had emerged as the favourites for the position when Harrison created the director-of-cricket role after Paul Downton was sacked following England’s campaign at the World Cup. — The Daily Telegraph