Arthur Crabtree wrote:Spinners are going to bowl faster on more helpful pitches, so they need to be adaptable, but Mo just got told all the time to bowl faster by a compliant press. It was about the time when Moores was in charge, and Flower was a kind of malevolent, shadowy Dr Mabuse type figure in the background. Reporters like Selvey and Pringle would bang away at it all the time.
Flower wanted to promote his own player pathway as the only way to develop players, so those people who developed outside of the system also had to graduate the Flower School before getting opportunities, and those players who came through Flower's system were given a bias towards being moved on for opportunities. Being successful in county cricket meant very little to Flower unless said player did so under his guidance. Players that came through over pathways routinely got blasted as having inadequacies when they arrived in the Lions.
One only has to compare someone like Ansari, who Flower spoke highly of and who's academic success off the field ticked so many of Flower's pathway boxes, to that of Leach, who was ripping up county cricket but had developed under Somerset's partnership with the Lehmann Academy and aide from the ECB systems. One day with Flower and he was told he was a chucker, had an attitude problem, and wasn't mature enough to play test cricket, much to the shock of everyone who worked with him. This sort of thing was routine, seeing players do better outside Flower's nonsense system rocked his ego and proved the science behind it wrong, so he was happy to wreck players careers to protect his own work.
Moeen is another example of this. I think its well known that Shakib-Al-Hasan saw his talent and got him to BD to work on his game there when he was younger, and Ajmal also is said to have noted his ability and taught him how to spin the ball and work on his doosra. Moeen was consistently ignored by Flower, when he won the 2013 MVP in county cricket he got no call up to the even the Lions team, let alone the winter Ashes squad. I think its fair to say Flower didnt rate him, or at least wouldnt until he came into his system and proved himself on Flower's own metrics.
It seems no co-incidence that Moeen was first picked in an England squad literally within the same week Flower left his role as coach, and that he debuted in the subsequent gap between Flower getting the development job. And then he scored a 100 in his second game and bowled better than expected, Flower's influence in not fancying him might have been overrided.
Still, because he didnt graduate Flower School, Flower would no doubt have a lot to say on what he needed to do to improve. He really didint like to see players he didnt work with a lot go on and look good.
