by sussexpob » Thu Jul 21, 2016 12:31 pm
As Pakistan romped to victory at Lords this week, one could not fail to notice an emerging panic running through the various fan and media outputs related to English cricket. After some time of recent improvements built largely on bowling performance and sporadic batting contributions, the fragile confidence of England’s fan base has clearly been shaken by the continuation of problems largely buried by improving results. There is nothing like an unexpected loss to throw the cat among the pigeons.
While panic might be too strong a word, there is certainly a concern about England’s lack of batting stability slowly shifting from a short term problem, breezing past the midterm, and now into the longer term. If we were to rate England’s runs in financial terms, then one could be forgiven for proclaiming the arrival of a recession. The England batting has been based on some key members retaining form, but at the moment a short term lapse in form from Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow could bring about a cricketing “black Tuesday” for England.
The key to England’s woes has been the unsuccessful attempts to integrate new batting blood into the system. England just haven’t been able to find players to fill the holes, and very few players have been successful. This has led to serious critique of selection policies, critique that the coach does not spend enough time assessing new blood, and critique as to the quality of selectors in place. The seemingly chosen path from Andrew Strauss is to sack the current selection committee, and to install himself coach/captain and “superscout” Andy Flower into a new committee to oversee selection.
Assuming this is true, this would be an incredibly radical development in English cricket’s long term strategic vision. And while Strauss has been applauded for these suggestions, and the press have talked up his decisive and strong attitude in forcing change, I am very dubious myself that this is anything but the final cornerstone in the original strategic vision of the Downton/Flower era.
Andrew Strauss is responsible for essentially putting in place the correct models to identify talent for the national team, and responsible for their continued development. In this capacity, at current he has Whitaker/Fraser and Newell watching players in county cricket to identify where the talent is, and Andy Flower at Loughborough working with those developing teams to improve them as players. The England coach and captain retain selection powers but see very little cricket in the counties, and their only real judgements can lie with those players provided to them through the various channels that filter in from selectors or Loughborough who they have chance to work with. Strauss’ job role leaves no time to leave “the office”. This does leave a rather important question; if the only people watching county cricket are being sacked, then who is actually watching county cricket?
I have often made my feeling well known on how I see the selection process. Stats can tell you a lot about a player, after all, a player with a perfect technique who is not scoring runs must have other problems, and a player with dubious technique but scoring bucket loads has other invisible qualities that are positive. Such a suggestion to rid the selection panel would potentially serve my overall opinion that selection is an overtly complex process well. Throw in the middle of table a stats book, add some context to the figures, and that’s all you need. Job done! Of course, I do not from a literal sense advocate selection should be that simplistic. Players can have workable weaknesses, be subject to bad luck or bad conditions, or thrive in different situations; it is therefore important that there are neutral observers looking at players constantly to see the more innate qualities a player may have that isn’t translated in stats.
This is where the longer term strategy blurs. If no one is making any base level assessments of players, then what is the intended selection structure going to base its assessments on? Is my previous humorous suggestion of the stats book in the middle of the table to become a reality?
Much can be gleaned from the people involved and their previous agenda’s. On announcement of Strauss’ appointment, it was highlighted that one of his main roles to consider was the “Player Pathway”. Currently, the official policy for player pathway available from the ECB was written by Downton with large input from Andy Flower and his ideas. And the suggestion that Flower would become the “superscout” for England seems only to validate the previous drawn up policy. Rather than enact his own distinct change, it would appear that Strauss is in fact going back to the ideas of the management structure that overseen him as England captain. This is not new at all, and it is not really his idea.
Taking one step back, when we discuss player pathway, we are focused on the development structures that players go through on their journey to the national team. A simplistic “player pathway” could be for a footballer to play Sunday league football, get signed to a professional team, rise through the reserve team (for adults) or development junior teams (for Under 21’s to schoolkids), and eventually find themselves in the first team where they can stand out. Strauss’ job is to map that out for cricket, and to map out those structures in place that centrally assist with these developments.
Downton’s pathway currently in place is called “Under 8 to England Great. Become the next England superstar”. Written for junior cricketers, it sets out to “help you (the young reader) to realise your dream of playing for the England mens team… and set out(what) you need to do to realise this”. There are four main stages of development suggested to identify young cricketers.
The first is the County Talent Programme. This is focused towards getting players from the age of 8 upwards to standout at school and junior level cricket. The plan is to then divide the best players in each geographical area into district or regional teams, with the best then filtered into a county team where their skills are showcased against other counties. Those that standout are then entered to the Emerging Talent Program past the age of 13 where they are again assessed and filtered at Under 16 level to the the third level, the England Development Programme (EDP) if they pass a “talent test” designed to assess all areas of talent and fitness.
The EDP only includes 10 scouted players per year according to this plan. The idea is that the “best v best” mentality accelerates the development of players in their late teens. Anyone who does not pass the 12 month assessment is released from the programme. Those that pass this stage are then passed to Loughborough and Flower’s team as members of the England Performance Programme, which is the last stage before the England Lions. At Loughborough it is Andy Flower and his staff who directly work with the team. There is very little mention about match performances in these documents. In fact, the whole process seems to be based on producing laboratory rats who excel in skill based assessments around coaches. There are some rather unsavoury requirements in the later development squads too; a requirement to excel academically, a requirement to be a certain level of speed or power, or have dedicated parents.
A few things are clear with this “player pathway”; mainly, that there is very little room for a certain type of people. England’s most capped outfield football player is a man famous for his lack of intelligence, and their most successful goal scorer apparently left school without any GCSE’s. Would these players have come through the academic requirements to have an education, even though they would be better than their peers? Would a chubby little under 16 year old version of Inzamam-Ul-Haq be cast off even though he had the touch and power game that all but a handful of his contemporaries have managed to match? What would become of the Jamie Vardy’s style players who suddenly come from nowhere in their late 20’s? The model assumes all people are born the same, develop at the same rates, and that all idiosyncrasies in personality and sporting technique are crushed out of people or seen as a negative.
You might think what does this have with England’s current selection policy, but I believe the point is obvious. The previous Flower regime was very keen to promote the idea of young cricketers with the right attitude and technique being molly coddled by the setup and given preferential treatment based on the fact that this stages of development both accelerate their skills, and enhance them in comparison to others that had not gone through the same development. In short, anyone who wasn’t good enough to pass the test at 13 is not worthy to escalate to the national team at 23.
To extend the point, when we also talk of the selectors now not being able to “see” players or know anything about them, it has little relevance. The truth is, the main drivers of selections in this suggested new system included only those with direct relevance to the team management and its official development sides. And with the official development policy in place having little regard to creating international cricketers in an organic way driven by county performance, one can only conclude that the selectors will “see” and “know” everything about every player they will pick…. Because those that are picked will solely be players who have gone through the subsequent performance testing at Loughborough. This is the only conclusion that I can draw, simply because the suggested setup has no other justification on rating players. The only point of contact between the national team and its selection poll is through Loughborough, should Strauss sack all of the selectors and take over their role with captain/coach.
This is worrying for the aforementioned reasons of sectioning away anyone who had previously not satisfied the criteria to be set apart at a younger age. It also is worrying as to what this does for the county game, as performances have the potential to be less relevant, and this could have knock on effects on motivation of those not picked as the “chosen ones”. Its worth noting that Vince was heavily favoured under the performance measures in place. He and Ball had disastrous tours with the Lions team last year, but that was ignored based on their attitude and apparent ability in “testing” environments. Vince has been battered this summer, and Ball returned 1/88 on test debut in a low scoring game.
There are obvious problems with making sweeping statements about players who have played little international cricket as they may come good eventually, but this method previously under Flower also had limited successes, and the knock on effect has been felt for a long time. Flower’s “babes” replacing his previous team that was almost wholly escalated to international cricket by previous coaches, have arguably failed. Bairstow and Root, at current England’s best batting operators, both were left after Flower’s era considered to be damaged goods and having large technical issues…. Since he left, both have looked different players.
Flower had his strengths. He was able to make players better for a temporary period, but the harshness of his regime and the little room for player expression and individualism, combined with his inability to spot new talent, meant he had a shelf life, and that already ended. I personally find it worrying that most England fan’s cannot separate the responsibility and failures that his system brought about in the middle to longer term, and that these performance models are now being enshrined into the system for the future, even though they are dubious. I for one cannot support any system that does not have selector representation for the 100’s of players in county cricket that have slipped through the net.
It seems is Strauss does enact this policy of no professional selectors, all he is doing is handing the true power of selection to an old friend; Andy Flower.... who himself would be returning to a position of influence. The only other way a player could be considered is through the stats book... there is no one else to make an informed assessment.
2010 French Open fantasy league guru 2010 Wimbledon fantasy league guru 2014 Masters golf fantasy guru 2015 Players Championship FL Guru 2016 Masters Golf Fantasy Guru
And a hat and bra to you too, my good sirs!