Clique and collect

There is a revealing and poignant interview with Craig Kieswetter, by George Dobell, on Cricinfo today.

The sections I’m about to quote should not overshadow Kieswetter’s compelling personal story. Here is a fabulous cricketer cut down in his prime by the cruellest of injuries. A young man denied his destiny by the nonchalant sadism of bad luck, now bravely constructing a new life away from the professional game.

But of wider significance is the insight Kieswetter provides into life within the England dressing room during the High Flower era*. It echoes and reinforces many of the assertions made by Kevin Pietersen in his autobiography last year.

That book has been grossly mythologised by commentators too lazy or biased to read it properly. Yes, Pietersen served up a handful of garish epithets about Matt Prior and Andy Flower. But beyond that he made a series of serious allegations about the ECB’s conduct, and two forms of bullying – institutional, and between players.

He describes vividly a dressing room soured by cliques. Dominant players oppressed and ostracised colleagues who were younger, meeker, or in any other ways didn’t fit in. Neither Flower, Andrew Strauss, nor Alastair Cook, took effective action to address this pernicious culture or its corrosive effects.

Little of this material permeated the crickerati’s consciousness. Inconvenient truths were repelled by ECB mouthpieces as “tarnishing the memory” of the side’s success.

Which is what makes these comments by Kieswetter such interesting reading. The words outside quote marks are by Dobell.

“It was a surreal three weeks,” he says about the World T20 success. “Of all the England teams I played in over five years, that was the one that had the best spirit.

“To be honest, I don’t remember it that clearly: we played golf, we went to the beach and we drank rum. Training tended to be optional. KP was at his best. So were Broad and Swann. But we were a proper team and everyone got on brilliantly.

“It was all new to me. I was so innocent. I was just loving playing for England and didn’t even think about any of the stuff that comes with it.”

It was not always that way. As England became more successful, so the tensions grew between those in the team. The trappings of success became more important and cliques started to grow.

“Success changed people,” Kieswetter says. “It wasn’t just us competing against the opposition; there was a sense that some of us were competing against one another. By the time we were No. 1 in the world, it was a very different dressing room.

“Cliques developed. There were jokes made in the dressing room if you had South African background. When we warmed up in training, we were split into sides: South Africans v English. There was lots of talk about it in the media and here we were making it worse. It created an unnecessary divide. A sense of them and us.

“The Test players were together so much that, when the limited-overs players turned up, it felt like you were on the outside. The Test guys hung out with each other, the limited-overs guys hung out. The spirit I experienced in those first few weeks was never there again.”

“And when I talk about cliques, sometimes the ECB made them. Players were exhausted and asking for time off, but would be told they couldn’t have a central contract if they dropped out of one format. They were terrified to miss a game in case it counted against them and they lost their place.

“Just compare how Australia treat Ryan Harris: he’s wrapped in cotton wool, he’s kept fresh for the Ashes. While our players are forced to play all the time. It’s not hard to see why we have so few fast bowlers”.

The Gradgrindian relentlessness of the Flower regime, the inflexibility of the ECB, and the reality of player burn-out through overwork, were of course some of the other themes of Pietersen’s book.

When you add Peter Moores, England players in the IPL, and free-to-air television, you realise that Pietersen’s book was rather more than a rant against his enemies. It was as clear-eyed and perceptive an analysis of English cricket’s wrong-headedness as you could imagine.

But the point here is not praise for Pietersen. It’s the further evidence of what went wrong: the accruing of silt in a corrupted system which ruined careers and led ultimately to bloodshed and betrayal.

*****

*(c) Simon H.

42 comments

  • There may well have been cliques in the England dressing room. But there are likely cliques in most teams. There were certainly players who didn’t get along in the great Australian teams. Warne and Gilchrist didn’t particularly like each other and Warne wasn’t too keen on Steve Waugh either.

    The question should not simply be: ‘Were there cliques within the England team?”

    Of course there were. But it would have been no problem had they kept winning.

    The question should be: ‘Why did these cliques adversely affect England’s performance? Why were they so mentally fragile that this was allowed to happen?’

    I think the answers to that question are far more revealing than simply asserting that there were cliques, which should go without saying. As soon as they were properly challenged in Australia, they folded and suffered what is probably their worst ever series defeat, when you consider how emphatic it was and the fact they came in as pretty warm favourites. It revealed a lack of spine, a lack of leadership and a lack of competitive intelligence. That is far more damning than the fact some players didn’t like each other.

    So maybe England just weren’t as good as people thought. Maybe that was the problem, rather than the existence of cliques.

  • Is it coincidence that the test playing “old guard” are out of the F50 team, or are the Ashes being used as a smokescreen? After these revelations it’s a legitimate question!

  • “It echoes and reinforces many of the assertions made by Kevin Pietersen in his autobiography last year.” Does it?! The article I read certainly didn’t. Sigh.

    • Dressing room cliques, toxic environnement, player burnout … ring any bells?

      • Ultimately he describes a winning environment. But I suppose it depends which part of the interview you’re determined to centre on and which conclusions you wish to extrapolate to further what appears to be a deep rooted agenda.

        “we played golf, we went to the beach and we drank rum.” hardly describes the “Gradgrindian relentlessness of the Flower regime” – If anything he bemoans the cost of success and the growing Ego’s within the team.

        • “we played golf, we went to the beach and we drank rum.” hardly describes the “Gradgrindian relentlessness of the Flower regime”
          No. It describes the “surreal three weeks” of the T20 success, right at the beginning of his England career.
          Either you need to re-read the article linked to, which contains some fairly pertinent criticisms of the England setup, or you are evidencing your own ‘deep rooted’ agenda.

          • So you’re just going to ignore the stuff about player burnout, the ill feeling against the ECB, and the South African / English born divides?

            • I took exception to the sweeping statements in the article and the assertion Kieswetter was fully endorsing Pietersen’s book.

        • Ultimately he describes a winning environment

          this is nonsense – the lasting legacy of that ‘dressing room’ is toxic, one of bullying, intimidation and quite possibly racism – if this is winning then you have not got a clue – are you Andy Flower by any chance? – or maybe the editor of the guardian????

          • Thanks for the replies.

            I just think this particular angle of analysis ultimately self-defeating.

    • It doesn’t about the headline grabbing bullying accusations, such as they were, at least not the bits quoted on George Dobell’s article on Cricinfo or the piece picked up by the Telegraph.

      It does about a divided and slightly unwelcoming dressing room, though on the cliqueness, aren’t they all? I suppose the point being it was more of an “us and them” rather than people naturally palling around

      It also does about the fear of missing out leading to players playing when they shouldn’t/overwork and the failure to come to terms with franchise T20 cricket around the globe.

      It also does through the lack of fun apart from the 3 weeks at the T20 tournament

      It also does through the constraints in the manner of play or asking players to play roles they’d not played before or change fundamentally how they play

      It also does on the occasional slap dash quality of the domestic T20 comp – although he is also at pains to say how brilliant Somerset have been with him and how much he enjoyed playing for them

      Taking KP out of it for a moment, there have now been a slew of players who played in the years 2010-2014 who’ve been critical about how the team was run – from stalwarts like Pietersen & Swann to ODI specialists like Kieswetter to occasional players.like Carberry & Tremlett.

      This isn’t to dismiss the achievements from that era in any way, but you can only grow and improve if you acknowledge when you’ve gotten things wrong, even if you don’t like the person doing the criticism. This is what it all boils down to and until now, there has been a relecutance to do so from the powers that be and those who take a similar point of view.

      More importantly, best of luck to Kieswetter in his future pursuits (he’d make for a refreshing voice in the comm box on T20 given his pedigree over some of the codgers in there at the minute) and he will always be remembered very fondly for his performance in the 2010 T20 world cup.

      • the constraints in the manner of play or asking players to play roles they’d not played before or change fundamentally how they play
        This is the bit I don’t get. It suggests either an irresistible urge to tinker on the part of the coaches, or the coach/captain disagreeing with the selectors about what players they need, or complete ignorance on the part of the coach/captain about what the players can actually do. I mean, what was the point of making Kieswetter bat at no 6? Why not find somebody who bats well at no 6 and has experience of doing so? Peter Moores seemed particularly prone to this, I don’t know if he’d been on a course about taking people out of their comfort zones or something.

        • It’s a point of modern managerial ideology that the workers, however rare or expert they may be, are replaceable tools – little more than entries in some kind of matrix of skills. And, in terms of their careers and the rest of it, resources (human resources!) to be monetized.

          So the chopping and changing is not a bug, it’s a feature. It’s a way of exerting authority, showing who’s boss — reinforcing the notion that the value comes from the decisions made by management, not anything being done by the players.

          You see this in engineering fields, you see this in hospital administration, and here we see it evidenced in the monopsony (inverse of a monopoly – a monopsony is when there’s just one buyer to which numerous sellers are tied) of international cricket.

  • A dressing room that contains cliques. Or, a dressing room, as it is was formerly known. You’ll find them in every club and county dressing room in the country, along with plenty of boorish mickey-taking. Fact of life. I’d drop the faux outrage, it makes you look as if you’ve never played any decent cricket or are just soft.

    • The interesting point for me is the bit about player burnout and discontent with the ECB. This was a major issue between Pietersen and the board. We all know there are cliques in every dressing room, so please don’t patronise the author, but sometimes these overstep the mark. These revelations certainly confirm the issues experienced by Nick Compton, who I imagine has played a lot higher standard of cricket than any of us on this blog.

    • A professional dressing room is also a place of employment, and employers have a duty of care towards their employees.
      Talk of ‘decent cricket’ and being ‘soft’ are convenient ways to elide that responsibility.

    • Anonymous trolling from someone who feels that bullying isn’t an issue. Classy.

  • Very interesting comments from Kieswetter. When you remember how Compton said he got into trouble from Flower because the bowlers were unhappy with it then we know who was running the dressing room. If Ason broad swann etc were upset then trouble.

    Dave – read his comments a little further. He says the cliques were formed in the test team.

    Success changed people,” Kieswetter says. “It wasn’t just us competing against the opposition; there was a sense that some of us were competing against one another. By the time we were No. 1 in the world, it was a very different dressing room.

    Now look at what happened to England immediately after getting to Number One. Whitewashed in Pakistan. 1-1 draw in Sri Lanka ( I wonder who was man of the match to prevent the whitewash) 2-0 home defeat to SOuth Africa ( who was man of the match to prevent the whitewash)

    The timing of this is of huge interest as the one day team have just shown how enthusiastic they were to play.

    Now we have the return of Cook Anderson, Broad. Will there be the same spirit. This being the team man that is A.Cook who continued to pick Prior on one leg because Jos Buttler ” wasn’t ready for test cricket,” and who saw the return of Trott meaning Lyth had to wait another 3 tests.

  • And as for tarnishing the memory of this supposed period of success. How good were England in that time. Apart from the Ashes away there are no outstanding results. 4-0 v India good but Zaheer Khan injured and they gave up. DOesn’t compare with the results between 04 and 05

  • And to query another one of these if it gets repeated enough times, it will become fact quotes – “cliques will be found in every club and county dressing room in the country”. That indicates a quite extraordinary amount of travelling and unparalelled talent for gaining access to dressing rooms! Must have missed the club I used to play for as well as our favourite friendly rivals over in Eastbourne.

  • Many thanks for all your responses.

    To those sceptical of my viewpoint, I would counter this:

    If Kieswetter had only encountered run-of-the mill cliqueiness, what prompted him to describe his experiences? He has nothing to gain from rocking the apple cart. And if the England dressing room was just like any other – well, clearly, for him, England’s was markedly different from Somerset’s.

    There is also a major distinction between people falling out with each other, or boorish piss-taking, and an institutionalised culture in which a cabal of senior players sets up their own fiefdom, alienating or subjugating their team-mates. This is the culture which Pietersen describes and to which Kieswetter alludes.

    But the real point is not the vindication of Pietersen, but holding the ECB’s story up to scrutiny, and cutting through the bullshit to expose the truth.

    The ECB ostensibly sacked Pietersen to create a new “ethic” and to rehabilitate the team environment – a commodity Strauss holds so dear.

    Ergo, it was Pietersen who had corroded that environment. He is portrayed as a lone trouble-maker who disrupted the dressing room. But according to Kieswetter’s testimony, the deterioration of that environment was the fault not only of the system, and numerous players – not one – but the ECB itself.

  • Can we be clear: the word “clique” is not a synonym for “friendship group”.

    Cliques are, by definition, insular, exclusive and (potentially) hostile to those on the outside — Kieswetter, himself, states that the England clique made jokes about the South African-born players.

    It is natural for individuals to gravitate to particular friendship groups, based on shared experience / interests — this does not equate to a ‘clique’. It is quite possible for members of different friendship groups to co-exist amicably.

    What Kieswetter describes is quite clearly not a harmonious environment, but rather one that seems to have been damaging to the team as a whole. To hide behind the “you’ll find cliques everywhere” line is to dismiss the substance of what is being claimed — for what reason, I could only guess at.

    • “What Kieswetter describes is quite clearly not a harmonious environment, but rather one that seems to have been damaging to the team as a whole. To hide behind the “you’ll find cliques everywhere” line is to dismiss the substance of what is being claimed — for what reason, I could only guess at.”

      Sorry, but you seem to be reading an awful lot between the lines.

      How do you know it was ‘damaging to the team as a whole’? Have you just inferred that?

      And when you talk about ‘the substance of what is being claimed’, what exactly do you mean?

      England got stuffed 5-0 in the Ashes – that suggests a problem far more deep-seated than the existence of cliques. England entered a series against a middling Australian side as warm favourites and ended up getting humiliated. Attributing that to the existence of these sinister cliques seems to obscure more pertinent questions about whether England were actually as good as many thought in the first place and, more broadly, whether there is something innately weak-willed within English cricket that causes them to go to water when properly challenged.

      It was, after all, the second whitewash Down Under in the space of three away Ashes series. You can’t blame that on cliques. Rather, what does it tell you about England’s ability to dig in and compete when it’s not going their way?

      • “Of all the England teams I played in over five years, that [at the T20 tournament in 2010] was the one that had the best spirit.”

        The ‘substance’ of what is claimed:

        “There were jokes made in the dressing room if you had a South African background.”

        “When we warmed up in training, we were split into sides: South Africans v English.”

        “It created an unnecessary divide. A sense of them and us.”

        “The Test players were together so much that, when the limited-overs players turned up, it felt like you were on the outside.”

        “The spirit I experienced in those first few weeks was never there again.”

        I am not blaming the most recent Ashes defeat on cliques! Although, the way a team responds to adversity does say a lot about the team and its environment – and I don’t think many in, or closely connected to, the side emerged from the 13/14 series with a great deal of credit, do you?

        In my view, the quotes above, from Kieswetter, spell out (there’s no need for inference) that the England team environment was unpleasant for those outside the ‘clique’. That the ‘clique’ was not appropriately dealt with by the management structure must surely have had an impact on the way in which those on the outside (Kieswetter’s phrase) viewed said management.

        That way lies de-motivation and, ultimately, demoralisation – you tell me might that affect performance?

        Again, in my view, ‘clique’ does not equate to ‘friendship group’ – it defines a more exclusive, potentially invidious, group.

        Reading the interview, I was reminded of that interview with Shazhad, which exposed the way in which Trott was treated for a mis-field (ie, forced to apologise in front of a team meeting.)

        • This all sounds pretty trivial, doesn’t it? The Saffas vs the rest could just as easily be a joke that gets lost in the retelling. I mean, really, harden up. There are big egos in professional sport and Kieswetter risks sounding a bit precious – or we do if we read too much into it.

          You talk about ‘the substance’ of the claims, but does Kieswetter actually say that any player(s) behaved unforgivably in a way that held the team back? Did anyone shit in another player’s shoes or grab another player by the throat or shag another player’s missus? What’s the nastiest thing that actually happened?

          All this talk about cliques just sounds like a way to rationalise bad performances after the fact. Like reverse-engineering an explanation for everything that went wrong. But in reality, none of this sounds particularly serious.

          But if the existence of these so-called cliques really hindered the team’s performance, then that points to a deep-seated fragility that should be addressed in its own right, independently of any post-mortem about which players were mates and which ones weren’t.

          If you’re playing for England but are thrown off your game by the fact the cool kids don’t let you sit with them at lunchtime, then that’s the real problem.

          • Anticipating Stokes’ tell all book in 5 years about the toxic ‘Yorkshire clique’ and how they wouldn’t let the others join their game of Top Trumps.

            So, what group did the English-born clique make their Zimbabwe coach join then?

          • Ah! The classic clique response: “I don’t see what all the fuss is about. It’s trivial, a bit of a laugh. I don’t see how anyone could be offended or upset.” Well done.

            • As well as the liberal use of speech marks in this thread, what’s certainly no joke is the absence of cricket discussion here.

            • Is this meant to be a rebuttal?

              In the scheme of professional sport, it’s absolutely trivial. People might be ‘upset’ or ‘offended’ but they’re paid to deal with it and perform, not whinge about it.

              By all means make the case otherwise but you haven’t done that in this post.

          • And yet one of England’s best players was sacked – in a manner unprecedented – for something similarly trivial.

            You can’t have it both ways.

      • “whether there is something innately weak-willed within English cricket that causes them to go to water when properly challenged.”

        Sir! How dare you talk about Cookie like that! Apologise, Sir!

      • “England entered a series against a middling Australian side as warm favourites and ended up getting humiliated”

        England weren’t considered warm favourites in Australia – the local press and fans were pretty convinced Australia would win easily. As for being a “middling” side, after humiliating us, they bear the Saffers in Saffer-land. They are a little bit better than a “middling” side.

        • You think Australians were confident before that series?

          I’m not sure what you’re basing that on but I’d disgaree in the strongest possible terms.

          I think you forget how much Australia had struggled that year. Prior to that series, they’d been beaten 4-0 in India and then beaten 3-0 in England. That’s 7 losses and no wins from the previous 9 matches. You have to go back to 1984-85 for a run as bad as that for Australia.

          Of course it’s all turned around from that series onwards but at the start of that series, Australia was absolutely a middling side and were in no way considered favourites.

  • There seems to have been a kind of ersatz National Socialist culture of “Aryan” purity around the England “team” Doubtless percolated down from Giles Clark’s ethos where anything critical or “unEnglish” is put down mercilessly and remorselessly!
    KP’s ostracisation ticks all the boxes for it’s methodology, not to mention Carberry, Compton, Tremlett et al.
    Some of the comments BTL in the MSM on this article, are, frankly, beyond the pale, and make me ashamed to be an English cricket fan at times, and am only glad I cant afford to rub shoulders with these twats anymore!

    • I don’t think you are far wrong ‘IronBalls’ – these latest comments by Kieswetter seems to have brought out all the nazi, right wing nutjobs in all the media – trying to be intelligent with their snide comments and inevitably not being intelligent enough not to slip up – I don’t care about the ECB but I fear for the state of modern Britain

  • Cliques develop in most cricket teams, at all levels, but part of the job of being Captain, Coach or Manager is to create a team environment where these don’t do damage to the team.

    My favourite example is reading the biography of a guy who played as a younger player for Australia in the early 1970s and was told by Stackpole that he probably wasn’t a good enough player to risk spending his leisure hours in the company of Walters and Marsh. Instead Stacky suggested he hang out with him and Redpath and go to the movies of an evening instead of getting wasted. Of course in those days the Australian captains were Bill Lawry and Ian Chappell who were both strong individuals managed the different groups reasonably well.

    • I think it’s become abundantly clear in the past 18 months – if it wasn’t already – that’s there’s a fundamental difference between Australian cricket and English cricket.

  • It has been long time waiting in my wish list. I have wanted to read the controversial Pietersen autobiography to know what this magnificent cricketer has done so unwell that the world hates him now.

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