Meet the new boss – part three

The arguments for and against Andrew Strauss as England’s first Director of Cricket are already well-rehearsed. But as his appointment is now certain, maybe we should discuss exactly how the known and unknown factors will affect what he actually does in the job.

Perhaps the second most depressing aspect of this news is that it already is the news, despite the lack of official confirmation or any word from the ECB. The organisation is still leaking like a bloody sieve. If they have something to say, they should either tell everyone – in other words, the public – or no-one.

Time and again we return to the opposition of inside and outside. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that if you’re an ECB mandarin or press officer, an inquisitive but friendly journalist feels like someone who occupies your world, someone who understands, and someone whose credentials bring a degree of entitlement.

You have known each other for years through travelling the world on the England circuit. You’ve shared the same hotels, drunk in the same bars. You are members of the same club.

To the same ECB official, the public, by contrast, are remote, amorphous and alien. You don’t know them from Adam. It rarely occurs to you to tell them anything.

In the English cricketing universe, you can only be in, or out.

Andrew Strauss is as ‘in’ as it’s possible to be – the ultimate insider, the apotheosis of establishment. In a realm of neatly-polished blazer buttons, his are the shiniest.

The most depressing aspect of his coronation is what this represents. When Paul Downton was sacked I wrote here that the move could and should signify a break from the past – and an end to the ECB’s jobs-for-the-boys culture of cliquey insularity.

Tom Harrison, the new chief executive, not only had the opportunity to reconfigure the organisation around outward-looking meritocracy, fresh eyes, and open minds, but had visibly implied this was his real intention. Some hope.

Who could possibly put it better than Geoffrey Boycott did:

It has been suggested in the media that in the next two weeks Andrew Strauss will be appointed as the new director of English cricket. If that is the best that Tom Harrison, the chief executive, can come up with, God help us. Why? Because Cook calls him “Straussy”, they opened the innings together for a long time, are best mates, shared dressing rooms.

So Cook will be safe and captain for ever, as will some other players Strauss played alongside. He is too close to so many of the current players to take an objective view. And if his comments on air about Kevin Pietersen last year are anything to go by, there is not a cat in hell’s chance of him returning.

So don’t hold your breath for the promised changes, as we will be swapping one nice lad – Paul Downton – for another in Strauss.

The more the England and Wales Cricket Board changes, the more it stays the same.

In truth we don’t know exactly what’s happened behind the scenes – neither the nature of their thinking and processes, nor their undertakings with Strauss, nor the mindset he will adopt in his new job. It is not entirely their fault – perhaps none at all – that Michael Vaughan turned down the gig. Vaughan cited the “limitations of the role”. Does this mean that the job description is too narrow – and by extension, impotent – or that it would limit him too much, in his domestic and professional life?

What of the other candidates? What happened to Alec Stewart? Is there no viable figure from abroad? What does it say about the ECB that, despite their wealth, there are so few people prepared to work for them?

That said, we could be worse off. At least Strauss is an intelligent man, and a careful, forensic thinker, with hefty accomplishments both as player and captain. He is in touch with the modern game. None of which was true of Paul Downton.

Strauss’s closeness to Cook (and other senior players) is – as everyone has said – a very significant difficulty. How will it affect him? It’s hard to believe the problem hasn’t occurred to Strauss himself. Did he wrestle with it before accepting the appointment?

Strauss is neither stupid nor naive. He has surely resolved not to let personal attachments cloud his judgement. I don’t remember him being an especially sentimental captain, blinded by loyalty and unable to make difficult decisions.

But unconscious bias is harder to suppress. Strauss may support and sympathise with Cook not because they’re friends, but because they see the cricketing world in the same way. Both are roundhead grafters, believers in systems and orthodoxy, and suspicious of maverickism and ostentation.  Strauss may ultimately back Cook because what Cook does, and represents, resonate with his own sensibilities – or at least, more than the alternatives do.

The Pietersen dimension is complex. It wasn’t Strauss who sacked Pietersen. Strauss appreciated what Pietersen brought to his England team, and said last month that “in terms of being able to do things that other cricketers couldn’t, in the England side while I was involved, [Pietersen] was the one guy that stood out for me”. Commentating on Sky last year, he once said of a particular situation that the ideal player to come out to bat, at that moment, would be Pietersen.

Strauss has publicly recognised the damage done by the nature and handling of KP’s dismissal. None of us know his true feelings, now, about Textgate, but he conceded in his autobiography that Pietersen did not, after all, relay tactical information to the South Africans.

If Strauss really is still fuming about the vaguely-known contents of one private and innocuous BlackBerry message – if his skin is really that thin – he doesn’t have the perspective or magnanimity the Director of Cricket role requires. Does he now recognise how the ECB mishandled Pietersen in the summer of 2012 – and his own contribution to those failings?

On paper, he has virtually ruled out a Pietersen return – on the basis of very Straussian logic. In a Lord’s podcast on 11th April he said:

If you look at it from pure cricketing logic, after this Ashes is over, it’s quite hard to see a situation where Kevin Pietersen would come back into the side. You’re building to the next Ashes in two and half years time and the World Cup in 2019.

I think if you were to bring Kevin Pietersen back it would be a short-term measure to help you win the Ashes but I can’t see that happening personally because there are too many bridges to build in too short a period of time.

And on 26th March:

I still think it’s very unlikely that he’ll play for England again. It’s going to take something extraordinary, England to lose a lot of games and for Pietersen to score a lot of runs – and probably for a captain or a coach, or both, to lose their jobs in the process.

I’d be surprised if he plays in this Ashes series – and if he doesn’t, then it’s counter-intuitive that he would then come back in the side when they’d be building again towards the next Ashes series in two-and-a-half years’ time. There would have to be a lot of things that go wrong with the England cricket team between now and the start of the Ashes for him to come back.

A lot of things have already gone wrong for the England team since then, and we still have the New Zealand tests to come. Strauss made those remarks as a pundit, not an official. If England are two-nil down to Australia, with two to play, a collapsing middle-order and Pietersen in good Surrey form, will he still maintain these arguments? How can he insist that a medium-term expediency will hurt the side at a moment where everything’s at stake?

And what will he say when the case of Chris Rogers is put to him? In 2013, Chris Rogers was older than Pietersen is now, and with virtually no international experience. In theory everything about his selection was panicky and shortsighted – but it worked.

Should Pietersen remain high on the agenda this summer, Strauss will end up in a similar mess to his predecessor when he begins claiming that black is white. Scyld Berry forecast the official party line on Saturday.

While England’s dispute with Pietersen over “Textgate” disrupted Strauss’s 100th Test, it is understood that personal feelings would not be the reason for maintaining the ECB’s ban, but the disruption that the public and media furore would cause to England’s emerging Test team if Pietersen did come back.

These words have the strident politically-leaked ring of truth. For want of a proper explanation of their policy, the ECB will transmit this line, via journalists, which is far easier than publicly saying “we’re got going to pick a player because you would make too much fuss”. The strategy is double-edged. If England lose the Ashes five-nil, without Pietersen, what of the “public and media furore” then?

My own conclusion is that, ultimately, Strauss’s opposition to Pietersen is absolute. This is partly due to a tinge of personal bias but more because of his mindset. He will look at the problem through the lens of systems and management-theory – instead of acting on gut cricketing instinct.

Darren Lehmann would pick the player most likely to win a vital game and sod both the politics and the consequences. Who cares about logic when you’re lifting the Ashes urn? But Strauss wouldn’t, for fear of disrupting the clean lines of his plans and vision.

Beyond Cook or Pietersen, it is Strauss’s devotion to systems, theories and analysis which will define how he does the job – and if it goes wrong, this will be the reason. Strauss is a famous admirer of the Moneyball school of thought. As captain, he pored over business and military manuals to garner and assemble strategies. Much like Andy Flower and Peter Moores (despite his differences with the latter), Strauss largely buys into the notion that cricket can be systemised, atomised, and reduced to the components of a machine. And in this manner will he run the England team.

For sure, international cricket requires hard work, planning, discipline, pragmatism, and a degree of logic. But cricket is an art before it’s a science, and certainly before it’s a business. All champion cricket teams are built on the creative, instinctive brilliance of individual performers and cannot function without the taking of risk and the expression of personality. Name me an exception.

Strauss’s England will try to play the percentages. He will decide on a model and oversee the selection of players who fit that model. The desire for a smoothly functioning system will trump raw but unpredictable talent.

Beneath this lies – to repeat a phrase I used on Saturday – Strauss’s overweening, cultish, belief in ‘team’ as a metaphysical entity. His philosophy appears to be that a team exists in and of itself. Devotion to team – and suppression of self for team – wins cricket matches by itself. Tell that to Shane Warne. It was the supposed damage to ‘team’ which so riled Strauss about Textgate. To his mind, the unknown contents of one private text were more likely to lose a cricket match than removing the best batsman.

Much depends, though, on the precise job description for the Director of Cricket, which we previously discussed here. Will the role involve overall team leadership, making the Peter Moores role redundant (but retaining tracksuit coaches for individual disciplines)? Will Strauss also be the de facto chair of selectors? If not, or neither, what will he actually do, without cutting across both Moores and James Whitaker, causing confusion and overlap, or simply twiddling his thumbs behind a desk as a white elephant? The last thing English cricket needs is another middle-manager.