Will Robinson’s hard line match Bayliss’ light touch?
Roderick Easdale looks at vastly different coaching styles in our men’s and women’s set-ups
Last year England appointed new coaches to both its men’s and women’s team. Both were outsiders – Trevor Bayliss was the first England men’s head coach not to come through the county system, and Mark Robinson was parachuted in from the men’s game.
Both knew little about the set-up or players when they started. Both inherited long-established and respected Test captains who were the side’s leading run-scorer. Both had important home World Cups to build towards. But there the similarities tend to end, for they have gone about their work in markedly different ways.
Bayliss has slid gently into his role, making few ripples. He has given much authority to his captains, as Alastair Cook explains: “Trevor is very different from previous coaches in that he puts a lot of emphasis on the captain to drive things forward. It’s very clear how he wants to run things and I’ve really enjoyed it. But then every one of the coaches I have worked with as captain has been great to me.”
Bayliss has been happy to have a dominant captain. But Robinson, after a few months in his role, decided Charlotte Edwards, captain across all formats for the past 10 years, was too dominant. So he sacked her.
“He told me he felt people in the team were hiding behind me,” she explains. He also told her that he would not select her this season. “My dream was to retire next summer after the World Cup in England. Losing the captaincy wasn’t a big problem, but I wanted to play on for England.”
“Lottie is outstanding as a person and a player,” says Robinson. “She would have filled her boots this summer against Pakistan.You cannot replace someone like that.You don’t make such a decision in isolation, and the easy thing would have been to do nothing. But there is a time when you have to do things differently. We need to create opportunities for players.”
Part of this doing-things-differently has been to move to a younger, more agile side. Lydia Greenway, 30, who has 225 caps, was also told she would not be selected this summer.
Both Edwards, 36, and Greenway announced their international retirements as a result.
New captain, Heather Knight 25, bridles slightly at Robinson’s critique: “‘Hiding behind’ is a strong term. Charlotte was outstanding for England for 20 years, but it wasn’t as if when she got out the dressing room thought we’d lost. But it is about us now looking forward, moving on and working out how to score runs. It will be a very different changing room, but sometimes change brings out the best in people. There is a massive amount of potential there.”
Edwards after her sacking reflected that her job “was to score runs – leading from the front was always my strength”. So it has always been for Cook and Eoin Morgan.
So, too, Robinson hopes, it will be for Knight: “She is not a captain first, but a player,” he argues. “She has got to make sure she is allowed space to get her game in order as she is one of our best players.”
Knight’s view of captaincy chimes in with Robinson’s vision: “I will always want to lead from the front and set an example. I trust my players and try to create an environment when they can lead themselves.”
Trevor Bayliss is still not familiar with county players, even a year into the job. Cook says that “one of the slight negatives is that our head coach has not been surrounded by the English game for years and years. That does give him an outsider’s perceptive, but he doesn’t know the young players coming through. The first time he sees most of them is when they are selected in the squad”.
Bayliss is open about his lack of knowledge, recently listing five players who could replace Nick Compton at No.3, and then saying that he has not actually seen any of them play. Bayliss views his role as working with the selected players, rather than helping to identify fresh talent. “The other selectors now have to make sure they are seeing enough county cricket, and are working well with the national performance directors, those involved with the Lions and so on,” says Cook.
Robinson, however, has been scouting hard since taking up his role.Yet he, too, sees working with the current team members as his priority.
“I have got many young people in the team already who need experience, so we need to create opportunities for then. For example, can Tammy Beaumont build on her World Cup; can Lauren Winfield fulfil her enormous potential?
“We need to see if we can get these players through before we look at people underneath them. The girls fundamentally don’t have enough belief in themselves. They have so much more to give and so much more in them. It is my role to unlock that.”
Maybe the different coaching approaches reflect less the person than the timing. After all, the men’s side has their own seismic change of captaincy relatively recently, when Cook was jettisoned from the limited-overs team on the eve of the last World Cup. But that pre-dated Bayliss’ appointment by five months.
Knight takes heart from the effect of this change, pointing out how “Eoin Morgan has changed their mindset dramatically”.
“Lots of investment is going into the women’s game globally,” states Robinson “and teams are getting better – all of them. It is a new era for the women’s game and we have to embrace that.We have to stop making short-term decisions.”
Is he confident his changes will make the side better? “We haven’t won the World Cup since 2009, we lost the last Ashes, so we certainly haven’t made it worse,” he flashes straight back. “It wasn’t as if we were breaking up a winning side. The next World Cup is in 14 months and so may be too soon for us ... but it may not be.“