New cricket coach need of the hour for England team

A few hours or so after Bangladesh seamer Rubel Hossain bowled Jimmy Anderson and England were knocked out of the World Cup last Monday, somebody logged on to Wikipedia and started to play around with the entry on ‘The Peter Principle’—the rule that says firms promote employees to the point of their own incompetence. No prizes for guessing what happened next. A quick tap of the keys and the second paragraph soon read: “The principle is named after Peter Moores, who co-authored with Paul Downton, James Whitaker and Giles Clarke the humorous 2015 debacle that was England’s catastrophic cricket World Cup campaign.” A cruel joke, but not a bad one. Eleven months into his second stint in charge, it is clearer than ever that Peter Moores isn’t cut out to be England’s head coach.Few expected England to make the semi-finals. But fewer still expected them to be knocked out before the pool stages were even over. This, after the Ashes schedules were rearranged to ensure that they had a clear run into the competition, and they were afforded an early winter Tri-Series in Australia to ensure they had time to acclimatise to the conditions. Another new low, then, for a team and their fans, who thought they had long since found rock bottom.Right now, “a look at the data”, to borrow Moores’ own phrase, shows that judged by his win/loss ratio, he is both the least successful coach in England’s history and the least successful coach on the international circuit.Read that, and you may find your mind turns back to the press conference that the ECB managing director, Paul Downton, gave when he appointed Moores last April, in which he described him as “the outstanding coach of his generation”.He was at it again on Monday, after Bangladesh delivered the knockout blow: “What has struck me has been how much influence T20 is having on one-day cricket and a lot of our players don’t play much T20 cricket, so that is clearly something we have to look at. The big message from this World Cup has been you have to attack, you have to look to get wickets and you attack with the bat.” This stuff is beyond satire. Has it really taken this World Cup to teach England’s MD that T20 has changed the way ODI cricket is played? Did he really come into this World Cup believing that steady batting and defensive bowling would be enough to win England the title? If he did, what has he been doing for the last decade? There are so many opinions flying around, but only one set really matters – the role of the coach. Get the coach right, and you’ll find a lot of things start to fall into place, a fact never better illustrated than in the difference Darren Lehmann made to the Australia team when he took over from Mickey Arthur. No doubt there are aspects of the culture and structure of English cricket that need to be addressed. But let’s not make this too complicated: the first thing needed is the best possible coach for the national team. No doubt the right candidate will be hard to find, given that many contenders are content to work in the IPL instead. So the ECB also needs to find the right people to run the interview and selection process. Alternatively, it could just leave it up to the same people all over again. Call it the “RePeter Principle”.