Do not repeat the mistakes we made after 2005 – Strauss
Ashes-winning captain tells team to stay hungry Former opener launches event to honour late wife
The England players returned to Lord’s yesterday morning to pick up their kit from the changing rooms and most were still wearing their World Cup winners’ medals.
At the same time Andrew Strauss, their former team director, was holding a press conference in the Writing Room to launch the Ruth Strauss Foundation Day at next month’s Lord’s Ashes Test.
It was a fitting moment for Strauss to talk about legacies, both cricketing and personal. For the cricket team he had a message learned from bitter experience: they have to make the most of this moment and not see reaching the pinnacle of a World Cup win as the end of the job like England did after the 2005 Ashes.
On a personal note, he is hoping the Ruth Strauss day will become an annual event at Lord’s, with the ground turned red on the second day of this year’s Ashes Test. The players will wear red caps, have red numbers on their shirts and Strauss is hoping supporters will wear red as well to turn the Ruth Strauss Day into the English equivalent of the Pink Test in Sydney, where everyone dons pink for the Mcgrath Foundation. All money raised from the Lord’s event will go to the Ruth Strauss Foundation set up by Andrew in memory of his late wife, with the aim of raising funds to provide grants for research into rare forms of lung cancer and support for patients and families.
Strauss knows how fleeting success can be. He was part of the 2005 Ashes-winning side who never played together again. He captained the Test team to No1 in the world in 2011 but a year later had retired, his team torn apart by infighting, a journey documented in the film The Edge which premiers tonight.
“We had a method, style and a group of players we felt could carry on and stay at the top, but we went straight back down again,” said Strauss.
“That is the lesson from 2005 as well. Nothing stays the same. Players change, players get injured, other teams get better. If for one moment you think you have cracked it you are already on the way down again. And that is the challenge for this one-day team.
“We’ve won an Ashes series and got to No1 in the world and thought that was the end in itself. We have to find a way of making this a launch pad for something bigger and better.”
Strauss’s first decision as team director was to keep Eoin Morgan as captain, a player he first encountered as a 14-year-old playing for Leinster against Middlesex, when he slapped Angus Fraser around for a half-century. Should that player, who is now a World Cup winning captain, stay on?
“He has earned the right to do it. To stay on as captain he needs to be driven and motivated to push people on, as he has done over the last four years, and if he has the bit between his teeth then we’ve seen just what a fantastic leader he is. The rest of the team will follow him until the last day he is on a cricket field.”
Strauss’s own team split in 2012 as Kevin Pietersen fell out with colleagues over text messages exchanged with South African opponents. It ended Strauss’s playing career and the pair have only just healed their rift. Strauss is due to play golf with Pietersen this week, and bringing him back into the England fold was always his plan when team director.
“Obviously my life experience over the last few years has made me realise what is important and what is not,” said Strauss. “Also I think you realise what happens in that team environment is incredibly pressurised and things can get polarised very quickly.
“Actually, with the benefit of a few years of reflection you just realise those things were not big things, they were small things in the great scheme of things.”