Bobat’s plans to regain the Ashes begin to pay off
England’s performance guru tells Tim Wigmore how he is working on the details for success in 2021
At the Melbourne Cricket Ground on Feb 25, the England Lions team made history. For the first time in eight first-class fixtures between the sides, England Lions – effectively England’s A team – defeated Australia A.
A few weeks before he was at the MCG, Mo Bobat, England’s performance director for men’s cricket, briefed the players on what it took to win in Australia. “I put up a slide up on the screen at Loughborough that said, of the four times we had won in Australia in the last 20 years, in three of them we scored 500-plus runs in the first innings, someone had batted for more than 4½ hours and bowlers had put in something like 40 overs,” Bobat says. At the MCG, England scored 428; Dominic Sibley batted for more than 4½ hours; and Ollie Robinson bowled more than 40 overs in the match, with Craig Overton close, too.
Plans, Bobat knows, seldom work out quite as well. But after his promotion from England’s player identification lead to performance director last October, Bobat is responsible for plotting how England develop future generations of players.
The role of the 36-year-old, who before his involvement with England cricket was a PE teacher, is best understood as like a director of football, who steps away from day-to-day concerns to look after the medium- and long-term health of the team. While largely unseen, such figures can be pivotal in building success that runs far beyond any squad of players who can remain together: the widelylauded Michael Zorc has been Borussia Dortmund’s sporting director since 1998.
Bobat’s role, then, is to do the forward planning to best equip England for the “two mountains” in Test cricket – the Ashes and World Test Championship – and limited-overs global events. He faces two particularly acute challenges.
The first is the relentless international schedule. When Australia dominated Tests and one-day internationals alike in the early 2000s, all but one or two Test players were limited-overs regulars too. Now, countries need far deeper pools to compete across formats. Within five months in 2021, Bobat points out, England play five Tests at home to India, a white-ball series in Bangladesh, the T20 World Cup in India and then start an away Ashes series. It is not inconceivable that England could call on 30 players across these matches.
“If someone’s going to play all of that cricket, and we expect them to peak in the Ashes, I think that’s probably kidding ourselves,” Bobat says. “I’d almost rather not be quoted on this, but if we get to a point where Ben Stokes doesn’t have to play in the T20 World Cup because we can prioritise the Ashes, that would be a great place to get to.”
Bobat’s second great challenge, even if he is diplomatic about it, is the domestic schedule. Even before the introduction of the Hundred, the County Championship has long since been shunted to the margins of the season. Bobat wants to make it “more closely replicate