2GS The Sunday Times April 3, 2022 13Cricket
all successful leadership depends?
I don’t know, but when the same
mistakes keep recurring you can only
conclude that either the message
isn’t right or it’s not being
communicated in the right way.
Either way, it comes down to the man
in charge of the dressing room.
Joe can’t let his pride in being
England captain — and it is an honour
no one relinquishes easily — and
doggedness (a quality, for sure) blind
him to the greater good. I write this
because I’ve been there. After the
third Test of a five-match series in
India in 2016, with England 2-0
down, I knew instinctively it was time
for a change for me and the team.
The words were coming out but they
were falling on deaf ears.
If I had stayed on after that tour,
I knew all the talk going into the next
series would be about me and my
future. That inevitably saps the
energy from a captain and his team.
I fear we may be heading to the same
terminus with Joe.
Being under so much scrutiny is
part and parcel of being England Test
skipper and sometimes it’s easy to
forget that there is a person behind
the captain. Joe Root is a great
person, cricketer and role model for
the English game. If he stays as
captain and proves everyone wrong
it will be an unbelievable
achievement.‘When the same
mistakes keep
recurring, it comes
back to the man in
charge of the
dressing room’T
his is a time for honesty.
Brutal honesty and no more
spin. The fans don’t want to
hear any more about the
positives after a loss; the
players need to know that
one win in 17 isn’t
acceptable for a side
with the talent and resources of
English cricket.
Owning, as a side, the fact that
results haven’t been good enough is
a start. That is the cold reality —
forget the PR coming out of the
England camp after the lost third Test
to West Indies that they had made a
massive step forward and even
played “brilliant cricket”.
I mention this because I recently
listened to Toto Wolff, the principal
of the Mercedes Formula One team.
Mercedes have won the past eight
constructors’ championships —
unprecedented success. This year
they haven’t designed the best car,
and as a result they trail their rivals.
In an interview Wolff came out and
said that the performance was
unacceptable. He could have fudgedthe issue but instead embraced brutal
honesty. Good leaders don’t have to
nail an individual publicly but they
must offer clarity and decisiveness,
which filter down and mean that
everyone understands how they
must improve.
After Sunday’s loss in Grenada, the
captain Joe Root offered the following
observation: “I feel there’s the
support of the dressing room behind
me and I’m desperate to see them
smile and celebrating because we
don’t feel that far away.” Joe also
referred to England having lost “after
playing so much brilliant cricket”.
I played eight Tests in the West
Indies and won only one so we
shouldn’t assume that playing in the
Caribbean is as paradisiacal on the
pitch as it is off it. But the opposition
that England faced was, at best,
decent. On flat wickets in the first two
matches, the home side had no
frontline spinner to call on.
In the second Test England scored- Against that bowling attack and
on pitches so benign, they should
have been getting close to 600 in
both the first and the second Tests. If
they had, then the supposedly bold
declarations which, it transpired,
weren’t bold enough to get the result,
may not have been necessary.
Paul Collingwood, the interim
head coach, described day three of
the first Test as “one of the best
efforts I’ve seen in an England shirt
and Test cricket” because of the
attitude and energy shown in
limiting West Indies to 171 runs
for five wickets. But attitude and
energy should be a given for any
England side.
Then in the third, decisive Test
there was a second-innings collapse,
which has become all too familiar —
see also Hobart in January,
Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane in
December, Lord’s last August. The
word in international cricket is out:
put England’s batting under pressure
and they crumble.
And yet the talk in the camp after
the Grenada humiliation was either
jargon-heavy PR speak or bordering
on the delusional. Test cricket hasn’t
changed much over the years, the
song remains the same: if your
bowlers hit the top of off stump often
enough and your batsmen can
negotiate the good balls and punish
the bad ones then you have a strong
chance of success. One win in their
past 17 Tests makes it clear that
England aren’t following these rules.
Thirteen years ago in the
Caribbean, England were bowled out
for 51 to lose in Jamaica. That
prompted the coach, Andy Flower, to
call a clear-the-air team meeting. We
had talked about wanting to become
the No 1 Test nation but now Andy
was laying out in the starkest terms
what the challenge meant for each
of us.
On a screen, he presented the
figures of the bowlers. They were
operating just below world-class
levels for averages, strike rates and
economy rates. I think a 5 per cent
improvement across the board would
have got the group above the line.
The next slide showed the stats for
the batsmen, and this is where it got
uncomfortable. Quite simply, he said,
the top order were way off where we
needed to be, and this was what was
holding us back. Silence filled the
room. There wasn’t a argument to be
had. The facts were there, right in
front of the batting unit.
If we didn’t score the runs, Andy
said, then he would find people who
could. Just saying this in a meeting
doesn’t transform things overnight
but we knew what the standard was.
I didn’t think I had done too badly in
my first three years of Test cricket,
yet here he was telling me I had to go
to another level. That meeting wasCook, left, and
Root after an
Ashes victory
at Trent
Bridge in 2015GARETH COPLEY/GETTY IMAGESAlastair
Cook
Root feels his duty
is to save sinking
ship – but he can’t
if people have
stopped listening
Jos Buttler scored the first
century of the 2022 IPL season as
Rajasthan Royals beat Mumbai
Indians by 23 runs yesterday.
The England wicketkeeper-
batsman opened the innings for
Rajasthan on his 300th career
T20 appearance and reached
three figures off 66 balls before he
was dismissed by Jasprit Bumrah
two balls later for exactly 100.
The matchwinning innings,
which featured 11 fours and five
sixes, came 11 months after his
maiden T20 century — also for
Rajasthan — and continues a fine
run of form in the format. Since
the start of last year’s World Cup,
Buttler has scored 404 T20 runs
at an average of 80.8.
Jonny Bairstow has arrived in
India, after England’s Test series
defeat by West Indies, and could
feature for Punjab Kings today,
against Chennai Super Kings,
alongside his fellow Englishman
Liam Livingstone.BUTTLER BLASTS IPL
CENTURY OFF 66 BALLSthe catalyst for change. The Ashes
shambles should have been the
catalyst for change this time around
but you can’t spin a 1-0 defeat to an
average West Indies side as any kind
of improvement.
Root has said that he wants to
stay on as captain. Joe needs to be
very sure that he is not being selfish
here. Like any captain on board a
sinking ship, he sees it as his
responsibility and duty to get it
floating again. Like all the great
players, he is a determined individual
and having spent much of 2021
digging our top order out of a hole,
he feels he has the inner resolve to
get England winning again.
That sounds like a strength but if
his players have stopped listening to
what he is saying then it matters not a
jot. If he was eavesdropping on one
of his own team talks, would he be
listening to a man regurgitating the
same old messages without the
conviction and authenticity on which