Peter Moores: 'The portrayal of me as a coach is wrong'

George Dobell - Cricinfo

"Frustration" is a word that crops up often in Peter Moores' sentences at present.

He is "frustrated" that he cannot finish the job he started in rebuilding the England team. He is frustrated that he will never lead England through an Ashes series. He is "frustrated" that history appears to have repeated itself. And he is, in his words, "doubly frustrated" that his portrayal in the media differs so markedly from reality.

That portrayal stems, in part, from a radio interview conducted by the BBC moments after England's World Cup exit. In it, Moores was alleged to have said that England would need to check the "data" before coming to any conclusions about the reasons for their failure.

It came to be a defining moment in his downfall. It has been used to illustrate his perceived faults: an obsession with stats and a propensity to overanalyse. England's talented young players, it was said, were stifled by such a policy.

But it never happened. As was reported by ESPNcricinfo, Moores actually said "later" in that BBC interview. But his words were misheard - an honest and understandable mistake as there was a minor microphone malfunction during the interview - and while the BBC subsequently apologised to him (at first verbally and then in writing), the error was public and the apology was private. The damage, in terms of public perception, was done.

The image of Moores as stats-driven has little basis in reality. So frustrated was Nathan Leamon, England's analyst at the World Cup, by the lack of use of his statistics that it was briefly feared he may go home. Meanwhile Paul Farbrace, Moores' faithful deputy and the man who has recently been portrayed as a liberator of the England team, has said repeatedly that the Sri Lanka team he coached to success in the 2014 World T20 used such data far more.



"I don't have regrets. I look back with quite a lot of pride" © Getty Images





While it is true Moores used the word "data" during an excellent eight-minute interview on Sky (he said "we'll have to analyse the data") it was in response to several detailed questions and after an initial answer that started: "Now is not the time to be analysing."

It is Moores' frustration - that word again - at such a characterisation that has prompted him to talk now. While he remained silent the first time he was sacked as England coach, declining lucrative invitations to give his side of the story, this time he has decided to speak in an attempt to correct at least a few of the misconceptions about his period as coach. He was not paid and the only item he would not discuss is how he was sacked.

While Moores will not be drawn on it - he is simply not the sort to be dragged into mudslinging - ESPNcricinfo understands that he learned of his fate after his wife read about it on Twitter and phoned him. Whatever you think of him or Paul Downton (who learned of his fate a similar way), they deserved better than that. The ECB, to its credit, apologised in private and public.

He does not comment, though. He hardly ever does. When he was sacked as England coach at the start of 2009, he said nothing. When England went to No. 1 in the Test rankings in 2011, largely with players he had selected, he said nothing. When Kevin Pietersen's book came out, he said nothing. And each day he woke up and read another column from an ex-player - usually an ex-player he had dropped during his first spell as England coach - rubbishing his methods and caricaturing his personality, he said nothing.

"I have to accept my time as England coach has gone," Moores says. "It's pretty hard to accept. But it's done. The umpire's finger is up. I have to look at where I go next.

"But I am frustrated. The portrayal of me as a coach in the media is just wrong. If people said 'I don't rate you as a coach' then fine. But when it's not what you are, it's really frustrating.

"I don't know how to change that. I've not spent my life trying to be really good with the media; I've spent it trying to make players better. I still passionately want to do that.

"I have an official letter from the BBC. It's a tough one, I didn't say it. I know what I am as a coach. I've done it for a long time. I've been in the game for 33 years and I've coached for 17. I know the game. And what I've learned is, my job is to simplify the game for players and free them up to go and play.

"We moved away from stats and data. Coaching doesn't work like that at all. You watch a lot to say a little. It's not a numbers game. We kept it simple. We tried to give the players responsibility to lead themselves.

"There is a big support staff with England. And they're all valuable. You need the security staff, the physio and the doctor. But there are times when you just want the 11 players and two coaches to watch the game and talk about it together. We were creating that environment. We were getting there."

The "we were getting there" phrase is another recurring theme. Moores felt his England side were on the right track. While he accepts the World Cup was wretched, there was evidence in Test cricket, that they were making progress. At the time he was sacked, England - a side containing half-a-dozen young or inexperienced players - had won four and lost one of their last six Tests.

Against relatively modest opposition that is perhaps decent rather than exceptional. But Moores did inherit an England side that had just been beaten 5-0 in the Ashes and was clearly in a transitional phase. It was always going to take time.

"In Test terms, we felt we had turned a corner," Moores says. "We were getting there. Would I have been sacked had we won in Barbados? You'll have to ask the people who made the decision. I was aware that things were building but I wasn't expecting it.

"The frustration is not being able to carry something through. When I took the job, I knew we would go through this period of trial. And transition is difficult. You will lose sometimes.

"The evolution, of a team, of a player, is that you're going to be inconsistent. You're going to lose. But in Tests we were moving and moving quite fast. You could see it happening. Young players were developing fast. And you know there is a timeframe for that.

"I'm also confident in my ability to evolve teams to become very good teams. And, given time, I've always gone on to be successful. And you're not trying to be successful for a short time, but for a long time.

"So to not have time to finish the job with England... I thought we were getting there. I was genuinely excited when we got back from the Caribbean."

Moores denies any mixed emotions at watching England's improved showing against New Zealand. But it has not gone unnoticed that, just as he built the side that Andy Flower went on to lead to such success (Flower, it should be noted, was always the first to praise Moores' contribution), he will spend the next few years seeing some of those he selected this time flourish in international cricket.

It was, after all, Moores that replaced the new-ball pair of Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard with James Anderson and Stuart Broad. He installed Graeme Swann as first-choice spinner and Matt Prior as wicketkeeper. He laid many of the foundations on which Flower built.

This time, his commitment to Jos Buttler, Moeen Ali, Gary Ballance (originally selected by Flower), Joe Root (who had been dropped by the time Moores took over) and others could have similar long-term benefits.



Moores brought new faces into the England side during both spells in charge © AFP





"I didn't go into the job to get the credit," he says. "But yes, history probably has repeated itself a bit. I'd love it if England won the Ashes. I'm an England fan.

"I've probably debuted more players than most England coaches. You hope when you introduce players that they'll carry on in the long term. I think we picked some good players who will become good England players over time. They'll go through ups and down.

"I know I left a united group of people - players and coaches - with a clear vision of where we were going and working towards it. I don't have regrets. I look back with quite a lot of pride."

It seems he was rated in his second spell as England coach, in part, by the mistakes he made in his first. Famously described as "the woodpecker" by Kevin Pietersen - an image that suggests a man forever tapping away at players and, as a result, preventing them from relaxing - Moores admits he made some mistakes the first time around.

"I don't think there was any truth in the woodpecker thing, no," he says now. "But I do think the version of me as a coach now to the version that first coached England is a better version.

"I evolved quite a lot as a coach, as a player would. It's no different. This time I knew what I was going into. You understand the real challenges for players, as you've been there before.

"I've reflected on that first time. We needed to change. And I look back and think, yes, in my enthusiasm, I pushed too hard. You should allow that to happen. I wanted them to be fitter and, yes, you can push too hard.

"So I knew when I came in this time, there had been mistakes made. I wanted to allow captains to evolve themselves and create a place where the players felt supported.

"Part of the skill of a coach is to disappear. You're in the room but it's as if you aren't. You're not making anyone nervous. Because if you need 40 to win in four overs, nobody wants a coach who is twitchy.

"Look, I've made loads of mistakes as a coach. But you make fewer as you learn. That side of my coaching, I know, I've got better."

England's performance - or lack of it - at the World Cup does not reflect well on anyone, though. While they went into the event talking an aggressive game, they played pretty timid cricket, with Moores' selections - Ian Bell as opener and Gary Ballance at No. 3 - contrasting starkly with the approach in the recent ODI series against New Zealand.

So does he accept that either the selections were flawed or he was unable to coax the best out of the players?

"In terms of selection, we got to the final of the tri-series with Ian Bell playing very well. I think he made two centuries and we made 300 against Australia. And Moeen was playing with freedom.

"We moved James Taylor down the order as we felt he was a good finisher and brought Gary in as he has a very good record in limited-overs cricket. He's a very good player. Ravi Bopara was struggling a bit and not really getting a bowl. It all felt natural at the time and we tried to stay consistent in selection.

"As to getting it out of them... great players don't always play great cricket. It didn't happen for them. Senior players didn't grab the game by the scruff of neck. But you learn from failure and the reaction of those players who went through it is encouraging.

"But yes, I felt hollow at the end of the tournament."

The one thing Moores will not ever do is blame the players. Never, in public or private, does he seek to do so. In fact, it is notable that, on or off the record, he does not criticise anyone. Not Andrew Strauss, not Kevin Pietersen (about whom he says, "he's a funny mix. There are things I admire") and not Colin Graves, who was in Barbados at the time of Moores' last Test but didn't find the time to tell his coach he was about to be sacked. His only gripe, really, is with his public image as a stats-driven, robotic coach and the interview that may have cemented that reputation.

It is notable, too, that several of the players have made their support of Moores public. Joe Root, who called him "brilliant" and praised him as knowing "how to get the best out of me", crediting Moores for his "drastic improvement", was the most vocal but also far from atypical. Whoever Strauss consulted before making his decision, it certainly was not the England Test squad. Many of them remain in touch with him. "Once your coach, always your coach," Moores says with a smile. "They know they can call me.

"Joe's words were appreciated. It was brave of him to say that at that time."

And yet, after two sackings and some treatment that can only be described as shoddy, Moores says he would still work for the ECB again. While he has not yet been approached for a role at Loughborough - an organisation that is about to have a radical overhaul - it remains highly probable that he will be. His eye for young talent, his record as a developer of that talent, and his ability to impart knowledge to other coaches, remain assets.

"Yes, I'd work for the ECB again," he says. "A role at Loughborough would be exciting. I love coaching and that would be working with the best players and coaches. Yes, it appeals.

"Professional sport can be cruel. Or maybe ruthless is a better word. You know that when you go into it. You are immersed in it."

His fault, as much as it is one, was his inability to play the media or political game. His failure to understand that style is as important as substance when it comes to selling yourself to the public. His failure to understand the dark side of the organisation that had employed him.

While a perception that he was closely aligned to an unattractive ECB regime - the regime of Downton and Giles Clarke that talked of people being "outside cricket" - no doubt hurt him, his main fault may well have been simply being a decent man in an increasingly indecent world. A man who thought that, if he worked hard, planned for the future and forged a strong relationship, it would be enough.

And that's the lasting impression of Moores. For whatever you think of his coaching - his international record is modest; his county and development record excellent - as a man, he has a dignity that is rare in professional sport.

A sense of perspective, too. After England lost to India at Lord's last summer, Moores was asked if he was at "rock bottom". His reply - "who knows what rock bottom is, but it isn't losing a cricket match" - sums him up better than anything else he said in his period at the helm. Even after his second sacking, he found a positive. "If feels as if I've got my wife and kids back," he said.

Following this interview, he went to see his son, Tom, a hard-hitting wicketkeeper-batsman, play for Nottinghamshire seconds against Warwickshire. The sacking has hurt, but he will cope. "A glass of wine helps," he says.

"I don't put this on," he says as the interview draws to a close. "I don't know if it's from my mum or what. But I am a calm person who can see the value of looking at people in their best light. It was such a slanging match last time. There were so many opinions. And so much of it was wrong. I didn't want to get involved. It's all so easy to do that. I'm not going down that route.

"I've been offered book deals, but it's not who I am. And if I did one, I would want it to be things I've learned and stories to help people get the best out of themselves and others. I have to be true to what I am. There's not a lot of mileage in negativity, you know.

"Of course it's been tough. This is the first summer for 33 years I've not been involved in the game in a professional way. But I'm a coach. It's what I do. I love England and I love cricket. The game doesn't owe me anything. It's been great fun working in it. And the hunger... it's just starting to come back."

On the English Cricket Board and insider journalists

What the papers say

by Maxie Allen  in The Full Toss • June 19, 2015

Over at our friends Being Outside Cricket, there have been some interesting discussions about the nature of the mainstream cricket press, its relationship with the cricketing public and its attitude to those of us ‘below the line’. You can read the pieces here and here.

At the risk of committing plagiarism, I thought I’d take the liberty of penning a few thoughts of my own. What follows is inspired by, not a response to, the thoughts of Lord Canis Lupus and The Leg Glance. I thank them for that inspiration, not to mention their wisdom and insight.

The misadventures of the cricket media are hardly new territory in our tier of the crickosphere. Many of the key points may already be very familiar to you, echoing hundreds of your own comments on both blogs during the last eighteen months. But we’ve not touched on the theme here on TFT for some time, and it’s worth updating our perspectives in the context of the here-and-now – the new mood of optimism and concord subtly washing over English cricket.

I believe there are three misconceptions about the nature of the cricket press. Firstly, I doubt all the principal correspondents have total editorial control over their copy. The editor is in charge of the paper, and beneath him or her is the sports editor. It’s they whom the correspondent is trying to satisfy, not only the reader. The bosses may ask for a particular editorial line, or at least a tone – upbeat, angry, patriotic, kick them while they’re down.

The space allocated for their reports will fluctuate according to the news agenda, with copy truncated by the sub-editors overnight if need be. If Jose Mourinho gets sacked by Chelsea, there will be less room for nuances about the third ODI. The words below the correspondent’s name will not always entirely be written by them.

That said, the more senior the hack, the more sovereignty they have. Mikes Selvey and Atherton, or Scyld Berry, are less likely to have their copy reworked than a junior reporter.

Secondly, the mainstream press do not write specifically for people like us, who read and write cricket blogs and follow the minutiae of every story. They aim at readers with a passing-to-serious interest in cricket, who have little spare time and probably read only a single paper. A city trader on the Tube. A van driver on his lunch-break.

This means complex stories get simplified – as happens in all branches of news. It also explains why journalists often put a postive spin on events, to the disgust of bloggerati sceptics. In their eyes, punters follow cricket for fun, as an escape from the drudgery of work. So hacks write about good news, and feats of derring-do, with an appeal to patriotism. They suspect too few readers are interested in the Byzantine plot-twists of ECB politics.

Thirdly, newspapers and websites (but not the BBC) are under no obligations to anyone. They are private publications, unsubject to statutory regulation which mandates fairness, balance, and specific editorial standards. If you don’t like a newspaper, so the logic goes, you don’t have to read it.

And we can’t always regard the cricket press as a uniform entity. Its exponents occupy a fairly broad spectrum, possessing a range of attitudes and approaches. Some have been more sympathetic than others to the laments of those below-the-line. A few have listened to, absorbed, and reflected our (often disparate) views.

All of this may sound like excuse-making. But there are a multitude of hefty ‘but’s. On the whole, the response of the established cricket media to the turmoil triggered on 4th February 2014 has fallen so far short of adequacy that no caveats amount to exoneration.

Newspapers and mainstream websites, along with broadcasters, enjoy many privileges. The ECB award them the status of ‘accredited’ media. This means their correspondents are appointed as the public’s eyes and ears, and receive seats in the press box, as well as interview access to players and staff, and off-the-record conversations with officials. Neither bloggers not readers are afforded such accreditation.

With privileges come responsibilities – chiefly, the duty to hold authority to account. You can’t have one without the other, especially when many papers regard themselves as ‘newspapers of record’. The inky press generally exudes a sense of entitlement and officialdom. “Because we’re the Daily X, we should be able to do y and find out z”. Once again, that right brings a responsibility.

With the Pietersen affair, the cricket media signally failed to hold the ECB to account. The ECB lied, and covered up their lies. It was as clear a case as you could imagine of misconduct and moral corruption by a public body. Yet this was barely explored and never properly investigated. Even material in the public domain was poorly studied. The ‘due diligence’ dossier passed by largely unremarked. Pietersen’s book was skim-read for lurid slurs while his serious accusations of ECB bullying and hypocrisy were ignored.

When vocal members of the public complained about this dereliction of duty, some pressmen replied by saying, ‘well we asked them, but they wouldn’t say’. This was a ridiculous excuse. In other spheres of news, the silence of authorities during a scandal becomes a story in itself. Front pages scream for answers. Newspapers ratchet up the pressure by cajoling third parties to provoke a response.

There were plenty of options available to the cricket press, had they been more tenacious and inquisitive. They could  have highlighted the blatant contradictions in the ECB’s own testimony. They might have striven for a whistle-blower. They should have piled pressure on the DCMS, Sport England (who give the ECB funding), and England sponsors Waitrose and Investec, to demand answers.

Unless I’ve missed something, none of this happened. Some journalists tried. A few tried hard. But no one tried hard enough. Too many approached the saga with all the forensic analysis of the lazy-thinking, cliche-reliant golf club bar-bore. They couldn’t see past Pietersen’s bad-egginess to the real story, and misconceived the saga as a debate about Pietersen the man, instead of what it was, a powder-keg of ECB malpractice and mendacity.

The recent explosion of the FIFA scandal provides an instructive parallel. While there is no suggestion the ECB or its officials have engaged in financial corruption or bribery, the misconduct of each organisation has common strands.

Both the Pietersen affair, and the awarding of the 2022 World Cup to Qatar, gave off an overpowering miasma of fishiness. In each case a bizarre decision was taken but never convincingly explained. Attempts at scrutiny were met with bluster, evasion, and arrogance. What had actually happened was not what was officially presented.

The British press, rightly sensing the truth, refused to let FIFA off the hook. Uncowed by Sepp Blatter’s snarls, they plugged away tenaciously, month after month, even after the original story faded from the agenda. The Sunday Times led the charge, their detective work uncovering a web of brown envelopes emanating from Qatari-FA linked magnates. The hacks kept up the pressure, and eventually the levee broke. Look where we are now.

When Blatter appeared at press conferences and argued black was white, the hacks tore him to pieces. By contrast, what happened in cricket? In April 2014, when Paul Downton emerged from hiding at the Moores press conference, and met questions about Pietersen with a risible stew of lies and obfuscation, the cricket correspondent of The Independent famously gave us this. 

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Stephen Brenkley @stephenbrenkley

It took 10 minutes for Pietersen issue to be raised at Moores' press conference. Downton handled it with aplomb, as did Moores.

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If the likes of Brenkley or Mike Selvey had covered the FIFA story, we’d have probably read something like this:

It is time to cease asking such impertinent questions of Mr Blatter, a good man who has suffered much unwarranted personal abuse.

The FIFA scandal demonstrates more than simply what can be achieved by tireless journalistic inquisitiveness. It proves that tales about corrupt sports administrators can be major box office and appeal to passing readers. And it shows the merit of pressmen fighting for their stories. There must have been times during the FIFA investigation when editors lost confidence and threatened to pull the plug and save resources.

But back to Pietersen. Not all journalists failed to ‘get it’. But too many did. And no one closed the deal. Why?

It wasn’t because readerships lost interest in Pietersen, judging by the sheer quantity of copy written about him. In some instances, editorial diktats, from above, could provide partial explanation. But surely no editor would have turned down a juicy story about skulduggery in the corridors of Lord’s if offered up a scoop on a plate.

The real reasons are several and over-lapping. Some pressmen were lazy, others too gormless to realise what all the fuss was about. A few were deterred by fear of losing access to the inner circle. But many were simply out of their depth. It’s one thing to write about batting technique or line and length. It’s quite another to cut through a dense thicket of political intrigue and obfuscation. A previous career as a professional cricketer does not in itself an investigative journalist make.

A number of hacks were guilty of blatant bias, which took various forms. They had a personal dislike of Pietersen. They were friends or former team-mates of Paul Downton, Andy Flower, Graham Gooch or James Whitaker. Correspondents were often reporting on the conduct of people they’d known personally for years. Within this incestuous bubble, objectivity was impossible. Broadcast interviews were suffused with matiness. It was the equivalent of Alastair Campbell hosting Newsnight.

Just as influential was a subtler and less conscious form of bias. Many former players now inhabiting the press box are cut from the same cultural cloth as the ex-pros who became administrators: workmanlike county stalwarts who never amounted to much at international level. Even if they didn’t realise it, those correspondents were always likely to empathise with the likes of Downton and Whitaker, see things from their point of view, and fail to probe.

By the same token, they were unlikely to view the story either from the readers’ perspective, or Kevin Pietersen’s. Pietersen, with his vast success, huge wealth, brazen ambition, and buccaneering flamboyance, became everything they never were. Unable to relate to him, the ex-pros naturally viewed the ECB’s position as plausible, inhibiting their curiosity. And it wasn’t only about empathy. It’s easy to sense in their copy their feelings of distaste for Pietersen’s brash and unclubbable angularity. But it went further. They resented him for his success – a success which held up a light to their own mediocrity. It’s not going too far to suggest that in several cases their journalism was corrupted by envy.

In the main, the press allied to the establishment, a total inversion of their proper role. They sympathised with authority instead of putting it under the microscope. This response stemmed from an inherent emotional alignment, between media and ECB administrators, for reasons more profound than the limited emotional imaginations of ex-professionals.

Journalists, players, ex-players, ECB apparatchiks, and mandarins, together form the Cricketing Class. All these people have far more in common with each other than with any of the spectating public. They inhabit the same biosphere, sharing press boxes, hotel lobbies, bars and airport lounges around the world. They mutually provide each other with parameters and reference points of conduct, acceptance and vindication.

The incestuousness of the cricket circuit explains much of the Pietersen failure, but also plenty more. Many, especially the ex-players, have little experience of professional life beyond cricket. Insulated within this cosy cocoon, a tranche of the cricket press long since lost touch with the people they’re writing for – members of the public who follow cricket as a pastime.

When was the last time any of them paid their own money to attend an England match? Mike Atherton, say, probably hasn’t since he was a teenager. How many of them queue up for a soggy £7.50 burger, when they can rely on the courtesy sponsors’ lunch, while watching every ball of play from the best seats in the house, not only for free, but paid to be there.

This being the nature of their working lives, for years or decades on end, it requires conscious effort to see things from a punter’s point of view. This is no more than a journalist’s duty, but few achieve it.

So they often fail to share the public’s healthy scepticism of the motives of those in charge, exemplified by their constant talk of “good men”, “working hard”, in “difficult jobs”. They lose track of vital consumer issues central to the supporters’ experience, from ticket prices to free-to-air television coverage. Mainstream mediacrats can’t imagine a world where you must pay £80 for a ticket, or £400 a year for a TV subscription, from limited means, just to watch the game in the first place.

I suspect this also explains why virtually no-one in the press box understood, and barely discussed, the impact of the ECB’s “outside cricket” jibe. When push came to shove, the hacks also regarded themselves as “inside”, treasuring their insider status and mounting the barricades against the revolt of the great unwashed.

This explains their defensive hostility towards readers who dared complain about their misconceived analyses and flawed reporting. Rattled by the impudence of outsiders questioning their judgment, a few openly insulted their own audience, in what must be a British media first. Several of Mike Selvey’s Tweets became infamous

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mike selvey @selvecricket

Social media was a good way to pass on information. But the trolls, idiots and know-nothings make it unpleasant. So I'm out of here. Sorry.

mike selvey @selvecricket

Often hard for journos to remember they are read by many many more people online than few bilious inadequates who dominate comment section.

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Selvey’s generation had failed to grasp the reality of twenty-first century media interactivity. In return for their custom, today’s consumers expect an equity share and a seat at the discussion table. They – we – visit mainstream websites to participate as much as to read. Cricket followers trust their own knowledge and judgement. They expect to hold the work of professional correspondents – who have chosen to put their heads above the parapet – up to scrutiny. And they can publish views themselves, via blogs or Twitter. You no longer need a job on Fleet Street to enter the public domain.

Every other branch of journalism realised this years ago. In cricket, though, few accepted the new deal and most were slow to realise how radically the interface has changed. Grandees raged against the dying of the light, firing arrows from their ivory towers towards the peasants storming the drawbridge. Their rhetoric of entitlement spookily echoed the ECB’s ‘outside cricket’ press release, with its bleats of “uninformed…unwarranted and unpleasant criticism”, which “attacked without justification” their “rationale…and integrity”. These patrician correspondents expected deference by virtue of their position alone, and met irreverence or opposition with pompous sanctimony and sour self-importance.

Others, however, were happy to engage with the public in a generous, constructive and cordial manner, on terms more – but never fully – equal. There lingered a loose sense of masonic, closed-shop sniffiness, which implied a belief that a human being is elevated to the rank of Approved Commentator on Cricket only through an elite process of divine selection.

In reality, cricket punditry is not akin to medicine or law, in which only hard-won professional qualifications confer authority. You can be right about English cricket even if you don’t have a badge on your lapel. This is ordained by the internal logic of the profession itself. If cricketers with no journalistic training can waltz into Fleet Street jobs, and journalists with no professional cricket experience can write about foot movement and bowling actions, why can’t any lifelong cricket follower have something equally useful to say?

The division between writer and writee was akin to clergy and laity. The common man could not be trusted to read the Bible in English because he was too simple to understand the word of God. Emblematic of a common press attitude were responses you could characterise as follows:

If you knew what I knew you would think the same. But I’m not going to tell you what I know. Why should I? In your position, you take my word for it. I am right because of who I am. You are wrong because you are on the outside. You are ignorant and uninformed, unlike me.

Such ripostes were usually fortified by reference to “sources”. In other words, the hack trumped a rebuke by claiming an insider had imparted to him an earth-shattering revelation, without ever saying exactly what. But what if that source was, without the hapless correspondent realising, telling them a load of complete bollocks? During the Pietersen nuclear winter, plenty of “sources” with agenda had every reason to spin a yard to their advantage. Because the press identified neither the sources nor the content, nothing could be scrutinised for its true worth. In the final reduction, anonymous vagaries were passed off as empirical evidence.

This story was not just about Pietersen, by any stretch. The competency of Paul Downton. The merits of Peter Moores. The legitimacy of Alastair Cook. Free-to-air television. Time and again, the agglomerate press circled their wagons of legitimacy and insisted they were right, whatever the evidence to the contrary. They branded as rabid freaks anyone foolish enough to reject their authority and disagree.

The more they lost touch, the more stubborn they became. And when opportunities arose to prove their good judgement, they gleefully taunted their own readers with boasts of one-upmanship. Desperate straws were clutched at. While thousands of sober, thoughtful critics, on BTL boards and Twitter, were dismissed as a baying, irrelevant, mob, a few hundred paying Ageas Bowl spectators who applauded an Alastair Cook innings were seized upon as representatives of the nation’s soul.

This wave of condescension and antipathy, directed by writers, and some broadcasters, at their own audiences, is unique in the history of British media. When bums start leaving seats, every other branch of journalism and entertainment responds by updating their product and raising their game. If X Factor viewers complain or switch off, Simon Cowell replaces the judges and refreshes the format. In cricket, if you don’t like what they do, they tell you to fuck off.

During the last few weeks, everyday life has calmed down. England’s exciting ODI performances, an opiate for the masses, have soothed the sceptic-hack relationship, at least for the time being. Victories are very difficult to disagree about, and the side’s upturn in fortunes since the removal of Cook and Moores has provided an (unacknowledged) vindication for the legions of BTLers who’d argued the duo’s inadequacy all along. Test cricket is another matter, though, and should Cook fail in the Ashes, trouble will flare up again.

In each of English cricket’s three estates – the administrators, the press, and the public – there is a decreasing appetite for conflict and strife, although this must not distract us from the vivid scrutiny the ECB’s conduct still demands. Contrary to what many journalists probably think, readers desire a positive relationship with the mainstream press. After all, we largely rely on them to provide our news from the front. They have access to people and events which we don’t. And ex-players will offer technical and experiential insights we may not spot with the naked eye.

But the relationship can only work if it’s bi-directional. In return for the vitals provided by journalists and pundits, we bring crowd-sourcing: millions of independent minds, views, and critical faculties, borne of millions of lifetimes spent watching cricket, playing cricket, and thinking about cricket. It’s a win-win. And to lay the first stone of this new Jerusalem, I suggest a little job-swap. A random punter should be granted a week in the press box, with all the trimmings. And during the same test, a Fleet Street correspondent should buy their own tickets and watch every ball from the stands, in the crowd. A change of scenery is good for the soul.

A matter of Life and Trust

by thelegglance

Like so many others, the activities of the last couple of days have left me in despair about cricket in England.  That the ECB can invoke a question of trust in their carefully rehearsed PR speak was roundly met with hollow laughs amongst professionals, amateurs and supporters alike.  So much of the focus has been on Kevin Pietersen for obvious reasons, yet the ECB will be perversely pleased by that, because it avoids the wider questions and the wider problems.

That Pietersen has been treated dreadfully is a given even amongst those who are not remotely his fans – and let’s nail this particular straw man argument right here, there are a tiny number of people who are proper, out and out Pietersen fans.  Most of the others are England fans who may or may not think the side would be better with him in it, but believe a team should be selected from its best players, and who know a stitch up when they see one.

There is no doubt at all that Graves told him it was a clean slate, not just from his public pronouncements, but in two phone calls.  Pietersen responded to that by giving up his IPL contract to come and play county cricket.   He did what was asked of him.  Pietersen might be wealthy, but making someone give up a contract worth hundreds of thousands is not a small matter.  There have been some comments that Graves is just one person and that no guarantees were given.  This is sophistry of the highest order.  That one person is the incoming chairman of the ECB, and Pietersen trusted what he said.  More than that, if he has gone out on a limb then there was plenty of opportunity for the likes of Tom Harrison to talk to him and tell him that was not ECB policy.  He didn’t do so.

Let’s call this what it is – a lie.  They lied to him, an action of both commission and omission.  Pietersen might be a controversial figure, but he did not and does not deserve that.  At no point yesterday has there been so much as a hint of an apology for that.  That is outrageous behaviour.  Whataboutery concerning Pietersen is not the issue at hand here – it wasn’t him that kept banging on about trust.  The ECB are the organisation comprised of people that promptly leaked the outcome of Pietersen’s meeting with Strauss and Harrison minutes after it happened, the organisation on whose watch the coach Peter Moores found out he was being sacked via the media before they’d bothered to tell him (leaks or otherwise is irrelevant to this – it’s what happened), who backed Alastair Cook vocally two days before sacking him as ODI captain, who allowed a private memo from the England captain in 2009 to leak to the press.  What Pietersen has or has not done over the years does not for a single second justify any of this.  To talk about trust is a sick joke.

Nasser Hussain tried to make the point that trust has to go both ways, and Strauss’s response that he isn’t blaming anyone for the breakdown of it simply isn’t good enough.  He can refuse to talk about where Pietersen is at fault, that’s his prerogative, but he cannot avoid the complicity of the ECB, the organisation he works for.  Tom Harrison apologised to Peter Moores for how he found out about his sacking.  An apology to Kevin Pietersen for being led up the garden path is the very minimum that is needed.

It’s not going to happen of course.  The arrogance of the ECB knows no limits.  Over a year later they still haven’t addressed the realities of the “Outside Cricket” jibe and the utter contempt that signified for those who buy tickets and play the game.  And here is the fundamental question of trust as it really is, not as the ECB would like it to be.  There is none for the ECB.  The way Pietersen has been treated – and indeed the way Moores was treated – are indicative of an organisation that considers human beings to be commodities and nothing more.  Losing the trust of individuals barely scratches at the surface of the problem, because despite the ECB’s apparent belief, the public are not stupid.  They can see how this translates into a wider lack of interest or concern for anyone that doesn’t fit into their narrow field of vision.

The media response has been  fairly predictable in the way it has gone down the usual lines.  What the ones who loathe Pietersen fail to understand is that it is not about that, it is entirely within their rights to despise him and not want him anywhere near the England team while at the same time recognising that the ECB have behaved poorly.  The inability of some of them to see things through anything other than a Pietersen prism is the reason they attract such contempt.  If Pietersen is a side show to the wider issue, then deal with the wider issue.  Being an apologist for awful ECB conduct is not journalism, it is cheerleading.  Let’s put it a different way, if it was someone other than Pietersen who was the central player in the drama, would there be such fawning coverage of the ECB itself? This goes to the crux of the matter, because if not, then it means that they need to ask themselves about the job they are doing – their loathing of Pietersen is blinding them to what are far more important questions.

It is abundantly clear Pietersen is not coming back.  So given that, it raises a whole series more questions about where we go from here.

The first thing that Strauss and Harrison talked about was the plan for 2019.  In itself, this is hardly surprising – all new arrivals give themselves a nebulous target some time in the distant future, usually when they’re fairly certain the near term is going to be catastrophic and don’t want to be blamed for it.  But there are a couple of things about that.  By focusing so relentlessly on it, they invite ridicule that it’s tantamount to a Soviet Five Year Plan that was simply replaced by another Five Year Plan when the previous one went wrong.  In one day cricket, England cleared the decks for the World Cup, moved the Ashes with spectacular – in one sense anyway – results.  Yet now they are telling us not to worry, there’s another new plan coming along, and this one will be a belter.

Ah, but we should trust them we are told.  Why?  For what reason should we trust these people who have made a monumental mess of everything they have touched.  Trust needs to be earned, as  Strauss himself banged on about with that terrified look in his eye, but he apparently again didn’t grasp that the horrible masses don’t believe him.

It’s nothing more than a permanent offer of jam tomorrow.  That can work for a bit, yet they drew much greater attention to it by self-evidently rejecting a player who might be of value in the here and now.  Anyone over the age of about 15 can remember rotten England teams, but it’s been a fair while since having a weakened side was specific policy.

The Ashes this summer are not sold out.  It’s not disastrously so, but it’s not brilliant either.  Next summer we have Sri Lanka (again – though doubtless they’ll compensate for that by not playing them again until about 2030) and Pakistan.  If ticket sales are struggling for this year, what on earth is going to be like next year?  The blasé talk about what happens in four years time is surely not a deliberate writing off of the near term, but once again it does give the impression of it, which is exceptionally clumsy, even if not intended.  Those who have bought tickets are perfectly entitled to ask what the point of going is if the current team is not the focus.  It can’t especially cheer up the players either.

Buried in the detail was the sacking of Ian Bell as vice captain and Stuart Broad as T20 captain. Poor Bell.  He seems to be the favoured whipping boy, there’s no question that he has been briefed against – when Cook’s position came under scrutiny for captaincy (not exactly a rare event) there were a slew of articles talking about how badly Bell had done in team building events to make it clear he wasn’t a viable alternative.  This is a minor matter in relative terms, but once again a player suffers in certain media quarters when the status quo is under threat.  Broad’s removal as T20 captain is less surprising in itself, but replacing him with Eoin Morgan perhaps is, given his recent troubles.  Broad might wonder quite how he has been booted while the Test captain is so strongly backed.

As for Cook himself, although at first sight it seems he’s been thoroughly backed, in reality he’s already been given notice on his captaincy.  The appointment of Root as his second in command is the first time the ECB have deliberately chosen someone who they feel (the “they” is important here) can take over.  The ECB are plainly not optimistic about this summer, and Cook now appears to be in place as a firebreak for when it all goes horribly wrong.  Not remotely the first time they’ve used this tactic, and whatever the opinions on Cook, it seems quite likely he is the next sacrificial lamb.  What that does suggest though, is that the Ashes themselves are not regarded as the priority.  It may also just be dawning on Cook that if he doesn’t win this summer, he’s probably out (it is the ECB of course.  So they could decide to grant him life tenure – funny how we don’t trust them…), and therefore if Vaughan is right and Cook said he would resign if Pietersen was recalled, then he’s signed his own death warrant by refusing to include a player who might give them a better chance, and thus him a better chance of keeping the captaincy.

And then we come to the question of the coach.  The sacking of Moores was nothing other than a panic response.  That he shouldn’t have been appointed in the first place doesn’t alter the truth that Moores had a point when he complained he hadn’t been given enough time.  Although you could equally argue he’d had far too much time given the results were pretty dire, if you are going to appoint a coach with a brief to build a new team, and then sack him a year later when the said new team doesn’t do too well then you’ve sold him a pup.

Both Strauss and Harrison responded to questions about Jason Gillespie by saying that he is certainly one of those they will want to talk to.  In ECB speak, this is tantamount to openly saying he hasn’t got a prayer, because the front runner never seems to get the job with them.

The Pietersen affair has rightly re-opened the question as to what sort of coach will take on a role where certain players are denied to them through policy.  It may well be the case that Gillespie wouldn’t want Pietersen anywhere near the team, but there has to be significant risk that he will feel having that principle enforced at a level above him will be considered an interference in his ability to do his job.  There remains the feeling that the lack of high profile coaches applying last time was directly related to interference in team selection.  And here’s the rub – if by their actions against Pietersen they have limited their ability to obtain the best coach, that is a far wider impact than a single player, and a direct failure on the part of the ECB to do their job.   This has already happened with the choice of Director, Cricket (I wonder how much it cost to have the consultants decide on that format?) where Vaughan hinted, and Stewart openly stated, that they would want to select from all players.  Repeating this with the coach is an abrogation of their responsibilities to English cricket to play the best team, with the best support staff, to give them the best chance of winning.

The ECB have tried to pretend the Pietersen omnishambles is a discrete issue.  It isn’t, it pervades everything they are doing and everything they have done.  The consequences of it are ongoing and extremely deep.  If high quality coaches are uninterested in the England job because of how they’ve dealt with Pietersen, that is appalling mismanagement not of a single player, but of the entire England structure.

The question must be posed, what is the ECB actually for?  If it is a governing body of cricket domestically, then their lack of interest in the game below the exalted professional level is a savage indictment of them not doing their job in any way.  Participation levels have dropped, viewing figures for England on Sky are now lower than they are for darts.  There are huge swathes of supporters disaffected and disillusioned.  Ed Smith’s ridiculous attempt to claim that all those NOT using social media are silently delighted with the ECB merely reinforces the cosy image of those Inside Cricket, talking amongst themselves.  They don’t see the anger, and are taken aback by it, because they don’t understand why.  The ECB hierarchy see the world through the prism of their own experiences, while the media have absolutely no idea whatever about the supporters and their world.  When did any of the journalists last queue for 90 minutes to get a beer?  When did they last find themselves squeezed into a tiny seat with inadequate legroom?  When did they discover that lunchtime is a terrible time to try and get some food at a Test?

They have no idea about any of this, because it’s not part of their world.  The reaction to the Pietersen debacle is one of puzzlement as much as anything else – the confusion of people for whom the masses might as well be speaking a different language.  There is simply no doubt the ECB have succeeded in keeping the bulk of the cricket press onside, while at the same time driving a huge wedge between them and the wider cricketing public.  Bloggers, commenters and tweeters might not be representative of the wider public (although they might well be too), but they are extremely important for one reason alone – they tend to be the kind who care sufficiently to consider buying tickets.   How many bilious inadequates not attending does it take to become noticeable?  One for you to work out Ed.

It’s a matter of trust we are told.  There is none.  And the worst part of it is, they don’t even realise why it is, or what they’ve done wrong.  That’s why there are some English cricket fans actively hoping for Australia to hammer England this summer.  Think about that.  That’s the ECB legacy.  Well done chaps.

England's breakdown of trust

Andrew Miller in Cricinfo

They came to offer clarity on Kevin Pietersen, not to praise him. But they left without achieving either.

To be fair to Andrew Strauss and Tom Harrison, the incoming ECB director and chief executive, they tried so hard to be upfront. They did the media rounds with great diligence - upstairs, downstairs, inside and out - tirelessly traversing the Lord's pavilion to repeat themselves to TV, radio, digital and written press ad nauseam.

They presaged their words with woolly preambles about how sorry they were that Peter Moores had been shafted, and how excited they were about their organisation's new beginnings, and how now was the time to build a better future for English cricket.

But no matter how passionately they expressed their platitudes, or how multi-layered they made their appeals for a reassessment of the team's priorities, the white noise of corporate bullshit was precisely the last thing that we, the working media, and by extension, them, the disenfranchised masses so odiously dismissed by the previous regime as being "outside cricket", needed to hear.

Strauss and Harrison tried so desperately to move the issue along, but they might as well have been Ben Raine and Jigar Naik for all the plausible resistance they offered in the face of Pietersen's onslaught. And the net result was that today's grand unveiling was a desperate and troubling disappointment.

Fifteen months ago, a culture of silence enveloped the ECB after Paul Downton's catastrophic decision to sack Pietersen, accompanied by a cryptic press release, the contents of which could not be expanded upon because of an accompanying confidentiality agreement:

"We have decided the time is right to look to the future and start to rebuild not only the team but also team ethic and philosophy."

Leaving aside the energetic posturing and magnanimous looking-in-the-eye that Strauss and Harrison managed in the ECB's second attempt to set the record straight, today's utterancescould feel every bit as cold, flat and insulting to many cricket followers when laid out for digestion in tomorrow's papers.

"We've offered clarity today on the ECB position with respect to KP in the short- to medium-term," said Harrison. "We are drawing a line under it to say this is where we're going."

Really? Pietersen has not been sacked, but he won't be selected, and Alastair Cook, incidentally, has the full and unequivocal backing of the board. He probably deserves it after a year in which the old regime used him as a human shield, but that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the issues that demand to be addressed.

The ECB continue to believe that the primary issue at stake is a breakdown in trust between themselves and Pietersen. They could not be more wrong.

The more frightening breakdown is the one between the ECB and its once-devoted public, a hardy and by-and-large educated breed, who stuck with the team through thin and thinner in the 1980s and 90s but whose faith has been eroded by every wrong decision imaginable.

On Monday afternoon, cricket stood still as a Division Two County Championship fixture involving a team that has not won a match for two years became the most talked-about live event in the country.



Andrew Strauss smiles through a media interrogation © Getty Images


By Tuesday morning, the new director of England cricket was telling the public to move along, there's nothing to see here. Such a stance is an outrage. Leaving aside the characters involved - and that, clearly, has not been possible to do - what sort of a perverse world does English cricket inhabit if the hyper-promotion of a match involving its most endangered county is suddenly deemed a bad thing?

Pietersen's decision to turn his back on the IPL's group stages was, admittedly, made easier by the less-than-favourable terms he had been offered by Sunrisers Hyderabad. But he was merely responding to the apparent olive branch he had been offered by the incoming ECB chairman, Colin Graves.

Pietersen has fulfilled his side of the bargain, sometimes thrillingly, and as a by-product he has dragged stupendous levels of interest to every ground he has visited, not least a crowd of 2,000 for a non-first-class warm-up in The Parks. As Alec Stewart, his director of cricket at Surrey, stated in very sanguine fashion on Surrey TV, "Kevin is very entitled to feel let down."

And so is the rest of England's cricket family, for want of a better catch-all term. Harrison, to be fair, recognises the urgent need for the ECB to re-engage with its drifting public, to enhance participation and, tellingly, to stop "patronising" those who expect better from their sport.

But there are better ways to go about rebuilding those bridges than estranging the one man about whom everyone in the sport (and even those outside it) holds an opinion.

It would help if the new management team could avoid coating their explanations in precisely the sort of boardroom jargon that most white-collar sports lovers seek to escape when attending a cricket match

It would also help if the new management team could avoid coating their explanations in precisely the sort of boardroom jargon that most white-collar sports lovers seek to escape when attending a cricket match.

"It's important to have a successful team to address participation issues but there are numerous ways participation can be affected," Harrison said. "One of the reasons we've taken this decision is to bring clarity and stability to the England set-up."

Of course, it's not impossible that the ECB are right, that - much like the Conservative Party's attitude to the economy - steering a firm course through the choppy waters is the only way to reach that long-promised new beginning.

Strauss's insistence that Joe Root was ready to take on greater responsibility chimed with a sense that, even in defeat, there's a hardcore of campaigners being forged within this new England team. If, by some miracle, they can extend their 14-year unbeaten run in home Ashes series this summer, then all sins will be forgiven.

And Strauss, let's not forget, picked up the pieces after the first KP-Moores debacle in 2009 and returned the urn by the end of that summer.

But the invisibility of, and the indifference to, the current England team is frightening. Moeen Ali, the break-out star of last year's Test series win against India, failed even to receive a BBC Sports Personality of the Year nomination, when Lizzy Yarnold (with the greatest respect to the skeleton bob fraternity) did.

And that's the other great sadness of the treatment of KP. With the exception of Ian Bell, who played a walk-on role in the greatest Ashes summer of them all, Pietersen is the last of the free-to-air heroes of 2005.

Harrison insisted it was important not to link his box-office marketability with that fact, but who could have witnessed Pietersen's 355 not out at The Oval this week without winding the mind back to that ludicrous assault on Brett Lee ten years ago? The ECB are expecting England's fans to unmake their memories for the betterment of the here-and-now. History, unfortunately, doesn't work like that.

It is, of course, possible that the furious masses railing on Twitter against the ECB's actions are not as representative of the national mood as they might like to think - last week's General Election set a precedent in that respect, a point that one or two members of the media have picked up on this week.

But if they are not representative, then why not? There is plenty to be furious about in English cricket at present, from the paucity of recent results, to the over-coaching of fast bowlers, to the decline in the recreational game, to the lack of transparency in the sport's global governance.

The ECB say they want to set out a five-year plan for the reinvigoration of the sport. But has anyone stopped to ask for whom is it making these plans? The general public have yet to be invited back into the fold. Or if they have, the message has been lost in the doublespeak.

-----

Strauss' Ishoos

Simon Barnes in Cricinfo

"Ishoos".

It was always going to come down to them. Because England cricket has become a subplot in the Kevin Pietersen Story and with Pietersen, there are always "ishoos". He has "ishoos", and as a result, everybody he touches has "ishoos" with him.

Andrew Strauss gave his first public performance as England's new director of cricket on Tuesday and revealed that Pietersen was not coming back to play for the England "in the short-term". Meaning not this summer. That's just to make it sound a bit less apocalyptic than his sacking last year.

So to clarify: Pietersen has been sacked as an England cricket player, and now he has been unsacked. "He's not barred from the side," Strauss said on Tuesday. It's just that he's not been selected. Which is quite a different matter. He could be reselected again at any time. That's disregarding the small point that he's not going to be.

And the reason for this? "Massive trust ishoos." Which is interesting enough. Though one point that Strauss didn't make was that he was not crazy enough to commence his stint in charge of England cricket by building his team round a 34-year-old. That would be a barmy notion even in an "ishoo"-free scenario.

We've all admired Pietersen's timing over the years. It's one of those natural instincts. If there is the remotest possibility of making trouble, or of finding trouble and making it worse, or of taking on a kerfuffle and turning it into a first-class row, then KP's yer man.

Strauss's job is England v New Zealand and then England v Australia, and he has made his decision about that. As yet, it's neither the right decision nor the wrong decision

So while all this was going on at Lord's, Pietersen was scoring loony amounts of runs for Surrey. He had been told to find a county and score runs if he wanted to return to the England team: you can't say that a triple-century, to which he was adding while Strauss's problem with trust issues was being coyly half-revealed to the public, doesn't add another pint of bat's blood to the witch's cauldron.

I suppose England did. After all, they picked him. Back then he was a South African cricketer with a reputation for mixing trouble and talent in more or less equal quantities. These days he's an ex-England player whose talent for trouble has outstripped his talent for talent.

It is a basic given of team management that any player, if sufficiently talented, can be accommodated in any team. If he makes the team better, it is the team's job to make it work. It's also the individual's job to fit in. So the point is that everybody has failed here. And now it seems that everybody has issues with that failure.

Poor Kevin. It's hard not to feel sorry for an egomaniac when people stop humouring him. Pietersen always wanted to be treated differently to everyone else: now he has been. First he was the only player in the history of England cricket ever to be sacked, and now he's the only England player ever to be unsacked and simultaneously unselected.

Perhaps Strauss's predecessor, Paul Downton - though the titles and the roles are subtly different - was wrong to make an issue of sacking Pietersen. Certainly it was a decision that made a sporting problem into a moral issue. And that put intolerable pressure on the captain, Alastair Cook.

Cook was forced to play the good boy, like Ralph in Lord of the Flies, while Pietersen revelled in his role as bad Jack. And while that makes a fine morality tale worthy of being studied by A level students across the cricketing world, it didn't help England win cricket matches. In fact, it's created a sorry mess.

Kevin Pietersen and Andrew Strauss in happier times © Getty Images



It's not in Strauss's power to undo that. He can't wind back the clock to the point when England fell apart in Australia, or to when the England players started giggling disloyally over the wounding fake-Twitter account that lampooned Pietersen, or to when Pietersen started sending derogatory texts about his own team to the South African cricketers.

No. By accepting the job Strauss has accepted that he has to deal with a few "ishoos". And though he dealt strongly and confidently with the England Test captaincy - Cook uber alles - and with the one-day captaincy - Eoin Morgan's your man - and with the question of the coach - Jason Gillespie is "one of the candidates ... I want to listen to their philosophy of cricket" - this was a day when the old scene-stealer stole the scene once again.

Pietersen finished with 355 not out for Surrey on Tuesday: a mischief-maker's delight. That stupendous score opens a whole new can of issues. Sometimes it seems that the whole world is united in trying to service Pietersen's personal myth: he was dropped half-a-dozen times on the way to that impressive total.

But Strauss's job is England v New Zealand and then England v Australia this summer, and he has made his decision about that. It's neither the right decision nor the wrong decision. It will be the right decision if England score lots of runs, especially Cook, and it will be wrong if they don't. It really is as simple - and as illogical - as that.

So there is Pietersen, playing the misunderstood innocent after producing what is possibly the nastiest and certainly the ghastliest book in the woeful history of ghosted sporting autobiographies, one in which score-settling was top of the agenda and love of cricket nowhere. If you choose to write a book like that you can expect people to have issues with it.

The real KP story is an enthralling tale about the nature of teams, the chemistry within them, when is a team not a team and at what point a nonpareil becomes an intolerable burden on resources. And that's all very well for us, but for Strauss, it's not about the moral agenda or the philosophy of sport.

For Strauss, it's a sporting "ishoo". He's made his decision: now he must pray that England have a decent summer and that Pietersen eases up a little on the triple-centuries. If those two things don't happen, there'll be more "ishoos" for us all to face in the autumn.

Kevin Pietersen ensures Andrew Strauss endures the shortest honeymoon period in history

I've heard there's an England cricket scout here today, so please don't score 355.

By Jonathan Liew in The Telegraph

11:12PM BST 12 May 2015

“Andrew. Well firstly, congratulations on your new role in English cricket. I’ve got to start off with the Kevin Pietersen situation.” As honeymoon periods go, it was laughably brief. Eleven words, to be precise. But as Andrew Strauss made his first public appearance as the new director of English cricket, perhaps the absence of a cordial welcome suited him down to the ground.

After all, in his first three days in the job, he has somehow managed to sack a coach, sack a Test vice‑captain, sack a Twenty20 captain, and sack a batsman who had already been sacked. At this rate, Strauss will be the only employee left at the England and Wales Cricket Board by Christmas. 

Besides, as the man himself put it, this is a sport moving quickly. While Strauss held court on the balcony of the Lord’s pavilion, across town at the Oval Kevin Pietersen was still batting. In the time it took Strauss to give his first interview of the day to Sky Sports News, Pietersen had gone from his overnight 326 to 351.

The dozens of journalists, photographers and assorted hangers-on began to suspect that perhaps they had gone to the wrong ground.

Instead of watching a batting masterclass by one of the modern greats of the sport, we were listening to a man in a sensible shirt and cufflinks giving a seminar on team synergy. Try selling that to the lucrative Indian television market.

^{A bright-eyed Andrew Strauss divulges ECB wisdom at Lord's}

But then, trying to take on Pietersen in a public relations battle is like trying to take on an octopus at Twister. You will never win. Even though it was Strauss and his boss Tom Harrison who had taken the step of meeting Pietersen for dinner on Monday night, they still managed to come out of it looking worse: like the famous Granita pact, if it had ended with Gordon Brown punching Tony Blair’s lights out.

In a way, Strauss and Harrison were desperately unlucky to have their big day out overshadowed by one of the batsmen of our lives playing one of the innings of his life. But somehow, the longer they spoke the less sympathy you felt for them. The ECB responded to Pietersen’s triple century with a humongous double standard.

• KP's England rejection: as it happened

Firstly the issue of “trust”, a word to which Strauss kept returning. In fact, he used it so often it was almost as if he was reciting the rehearsed spiel of a prewritten PR script, not that we would ever accuse him of that.

And so important did Strauss appear to regard the issue of trust that you began to wonder whether he had stumbled upon some undiscovered secret of the game, a Moneyball-style performance metric that would blow the sport wide open. “Yes, we lost 2-0 to New Zealand and our batsmen failed miserably. But on the plus side, Chris Jordan let Jos Buttler borrow his garden shears, so it’s been a good week on the whole.” 

How are you supposed to build trust, anyway? Perhaps, in retrospect, the whole idea of Pietersen going back to Surrey and scoring runs in county cricket was a complete red herring. What he and Strauss clearly needed was a weekend in Snowdonia: trekking over the hills, taking it in turns to fall backwards and catch each other, sharing their deepest and darkest secrets by the campfire.

Instead, Strauss’s idea of an olive branch was to invite Pietersen to join his one-day cricket advisory panel. History does not record whether this offer was made before or after Strauss told Pietersen he did not trust him, but either way it was the equivalent of not inviting someone to a dinner party, and then asking him if he knows a decent recipe for Dover sole.

“He’s got some very strong views on one-day cricket, and I think it would be madness not to try and get that information out of his head,” Strauss said, inadvertently hinting at some form of invasive surgery.

^{Kevin Pietersen's innings at the Oval – more interesting than a team synergy lecture}

Beside Strauss, Harrison was nodding vigorously. Harrison seemed impressive at first glance. He looked his interlocutors in the eye, admitted that mistakes had been made over the handling of Peter Moores’s sacking, announced his magnanimous intention to “draw a line” under the whole sordid Pietersen affair, whilst obviously ruling nothing out.

Evidently, Harrison was presenting himself as the smooth-talking antidote to scattergun chairman Colin Graves. County chief executives joke among themselves that “ECB” presently stands for “Explaining Colin’s Behaviour”.

• Tom Harrison, the ECB's hatchet man

Obviously, no guarantees could be given about Pietersen’s future. No player, after all, has a divine right to a place in the side. Unless, of course, your name is Alastair Cook, who a beaming Strauss confirmed as captain for the Ashes series this summer.

And obviously the England team need “stability”, as Strauss put it shortly after removing Moores as coach, Ian Bell as Test vice-captain, Stuart Broad as Twenty20 captain and recommending a new selection system.

^{Strauss develops a trusting relationship with a reporter}

Obviously we want to “broaden the audience” of English cricket, Strauss said, whilst shutting the door on English cricket’s single most electrifying talent of our generation. And obviously we want cricketers “who can think for themselves”, Strauss enthused, whilst laying out the job specification for a new coach who will be told not to pick Pietersen.

The most alarming trait of today’s ECB is not the hypocrisy, but the doublethink. They really do seem to believe that you can have one rule for the captain and one rule for everyone else. That you can tell a player to go and score runs in county cricket and then turn him away when he does. And that there is nothing especially untoward in any of this, and anybody who says so is probably a splitter or a Piers Morgan fan or something.

Perhaps it is a little unfair to blame Strauss for all this. He has, after all, inherited someone else’s mess, and is clearly addressing it with the best of intentions. But from his first appearance in office, one thing was manifestly clear. The ECB’s real issue of trust is not with Pietersen but with us.