Bayliss has to re-evaluate role
In football and rugby the Australian would be fighting to keep his job with such a poor record
The post of England coach in Test-match cricket was made to look anachronistic in this series, as Trevor Bayliss presided over a walloping that would bring the guillotine rolling through the streets in other big team sports.
Among the cognoscenti, there will be no appetite to make Bayliss pay the price for England’s systemic failure in Australia, where only three English batsmen posted a better average than Pat Cummins, the home side’s leading wicket-taker, and where Joe Root’s men were soundly beaten at batting, bowling, curfews and propaganda.
The defeat was so comprehensive – so inarguable – that to fixate on England’s coaching staff would conceal the deeper issues. In summary, as Chris Tremlett tweeted amid the rubble: “Players and management can be as honest as they want about this tour, but if we keep playing a style of cricket that relies on the swinging ball all around the world then it’s going to continue to be the same outcome away from home.”
Tremlett’s verdict was a variation of Geoffrey Boycott’s grilling of James Anderson on BT Sport about England’s “failure to prepare”. Boycott meant that Bayliss’s team turned up in Brisbane in November as if it were just another trip. They brought a knife to a gunfight. There was no apparent long-term planning for the specific challenge of playing Australia in Australia. A more pessimistic interpretation would be that no team can get ready for a series in which they lack the right kind of player (quick bowlers, mainly) and are likely to be outclassed in home conditions.
But English cricket is still entitled to ask in that context what difference Bayliss made, what his contribution was. The minimum it can demand is that the coach should place the side in a position of maximum opportunity. Or, the other way round: make the opposition’s chances as small as possible, given the manpower disparities.
In football and rugby, which share cricket’s tendency to appoint a coach who is the opposite of the one just fired, Bayliss would be fighting to keep his job with a Test match record of played 38, won 15, drawn five, lost 18. Overseas, he has played 19, won three, drawn four and lost 12.
In his sport, though, Bayliss is asked to oversee three forms of the game, with Test cricket increasingly the least important (at least in the minds of dealmakers and futurologists). England’s worst-kept secret is that Bayliss was hired to raise their profile in the shorter forms of the game.
But it leaves Test cricket limping along behind, certainly away from home, where swing bowling is often negated and batsmen have lost the art of patience. In rugby and football, the head coach or manager is more or less commander in chief: scout, selector and tactical overlord. In cricket, Bayliss is said to have no great knowledge of the county scene, works with the selectors, James Whitaker, Angus Fraser and Mick Newell, on squad selection, and is not the over-by-over decision-maker on the field.
Much of this is historical, or traditional, of course. Captains run cricket matches. Yet, it looked a broken model in Australia, where Bayliss could not stop James Vince (average: 27) wafting his wicket to Australian catchers, was powerless to halt Moeen Ali’s disintegration with ball and bat, and seemed taken aback by Australian mischief-making over the Jonny Bairstow butt and ‘ball tampering’ in Melbourne – both total non-events. At the same time Root lost his captaincy battle with Steve Smith.
Bayliss seemed to be reacting all the time to Australian provocations and was unable to make some of these players understand the cost of larking about in nightclubs after midnight when the series was already going badly.
International players prefer laissez-faire to iron rod, but some will also abuse that privilege. And the wider risk is that the leader comes to be seen as an avuncular figure whose authority can easily be circumvented.
Another question requiring answers is England’s failure to capitalise when they were in control, in individual sessions, which brought the debate back round to discipline and mental toughness. To some, the challenge posed by Smith and Australia’s formidable quartet of bowlers was an alien test that they felt no real compunction to get on top of. In adversity, in tournaments, the fatalism of players has cost many an England football manager his job, but it feels predictable on Ashes tours of Australia.
That hemispherical predictability would not be cured by the England and Wales Cricket Board sacking Bayliss. Nor would his dismissal cause spinners, quicks or English versions of Smith to sprout from county soil. T20’s tanks would continue to roll across Test cricket. At the same time, the returns from this series – the messages England’s performances conveyed – were not good enough, and nobody in charge can afford to file away a 4-0 defeat as a problem to be faced when the side next tour Australia.
The Ashes, away from home, have become an afterthought. Shabby treatment for a great tradition.