Now Silverwood axed by England after Ashes woe
The only surprise in chris silverwood’s sacking last night as england coach was that his assistant Graham Thorpe did not go with him.
clearly the ecB have decided only one of the many responsible for the worst of all Ashes debacles will leave at any one time. so the culling could last for some time yet.
And they clearly feel 7pm should be the hour of doom as it has brought bad news on successive days from a rudderless governing body who now find themselves without a chair, an england coach and with only an interim managing director in Andrew strauss.
At least the former england captain is the one person to be trusted in an ecB that is unfit for
purpose and strauss will today step up a latest rescue operation that is even bigger than those he undertook when he became captain in 2009 and team director in 2015.
strauss clearly does not muck about. his first act after taking over seven years ago was to sack Peter Moores as coach and now he has repeated the trick with silverwood. Both moves were greeted with sadness because they involved good english coaches with considerable success in county cricket. But both were completely justified.
strauss will appoint a caretaker coach for a three-Test tour of the caribbean that begins in just three weeks’ time before turning his attention to a permanent arrangement that, as revealed in Sportsmail yesterday, will involve new red and white-ball coaches.
There will also be a return of a national selector, with former england assistant coach and now Warwickshire director of cricket Paul Farbrace a prime candidate.
Alec stewart remains the best option for the interim coaching role but there was also support yesterday for Richard Dawson, already in Antigua as coach of the england Under-19s side who have reached tomorrow’s World cup final against india. At least the ecB would save themselves an air fare if they appointed him.
For now there will be sympathy for silverwood, a good coach and an even better man, but also an acceptance that he had to go, just as the person who handed him the poisoned chalice of the supremo role in Ashley Giles had to go ahead of him, too.
how long ago it seems now that silverwood sat down in new Zealand in late 2019 and outlined his plans that were all meant to culminate with a credible Ashes challenge. And how long ago, too, it seems that england were victorious in south Africa early in 2020 and even when they were winning the first Test in india early last year.
The decline of england in Test cricket since then has been dramatic and, for all the understandable insistence of both Giles and silverwood that allowances should be made for the pandemic, too many mistakes were made for either to survive.
silverwood won the championship with essex in 2017 and, just like Moores, he can be expected to go back to domestic cricket once he has had the ‘quality family time’ he promised himself last night.
Thorpe’s situation, meanwhile, is intriguing. Sportsmail revealed his position had become untenable when he was warned by police at the end of the Ashes for smoking a cigar inside during a late night drinking session in hobart he captured himself on video. it was the culmination of what appeared to be a drinking culture among coaches more than players in Australia and it would be a huge surprise if 7pm tonight does not bring another scalp in Thorpe. or perhaps this morning when strauss and ecB chief executive Tom harrison, in a rare public appearance, face the music at lord’s.
The one person who really should be going, of course, is harrison, the man most responsible for the undermining of first-class cricket in england.
instead, he will stagger on until he has pocketed his share of a £2.1m bonus handed out for delivering The hundred that is one of the main reasons why the red-ball cricket is in rapid decline.
‘chris has given absolutely everything to make a success of this role,’ said harrison in an ecB
statement last night. ‘he is a man of great integrity who players and staff alike have enjoyed working with.’
if harrison had half the integrity of silverwood he would have gone long before now. instead, he somehow remains to oversee the latest rebuild. At least in strauss the ecB have the man to put the right bricks in place yet again.