Next England coach - place your bets

[Alviro Patterson]

https://www.espncricinfo.com/story/_/id ... silverwood

The headline is a bit misleading, of course winning The Ashes is top priority but so is the Twenty20 World Cup and a test series in India. Winning or even drawing a test series in India would be as big of an achievement as winning The Ashes down under.

Silverwood appears to be happy in tapping into the expertise of his colleagues, which is a sign of quality man-management and interpersonal skills. Getting Paul Collingwood on the staff is very significant and gives an element of continuity in England's white ball success.

England's success will boil down to preparation and that was a main weakness in the Bayliss and Strauss era. You just can't prepare for an Ashes series on the back of playing white ball cricket, or go on a tour to India with no warm up matches. The ECB also need to apply joined up thinking when it comes to scheduling domestic matches and align them with the international games. For example, there is no County Championship cricket in the 2nd half of July prior to the opening test match against Pakistan on 30th July because The Hundred starts on the 17th. Surely there needs to be at least one round of County Championship matches so test players can get some time at the crease, as opposed to coming off playing limited overs internationals.

[Arthur Crabtree]

England announce Flower moves on.

Hell, Giles is such a speak your weight machine. How can he not know?

[alfie]

Silverwood seems to be the next coach. I was hoping for Kirsten. Silverwood seems to be too quiet.

He looks a lot less like Hugh Grant than he used to.

Good luck to him. He did well at Essex and he's not an establishment figure and he's not Andy Flower (or Peter Moores) again. He'll know the county game (unlike Bayliss). He's taking over a pretty moribund England Test team, and he'll struggle to match Bayliss in limited overs. Tough job.

Plus he's a bowler. We are always smarter than batsmen ...have to be because they always make the rules to suit them