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.

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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.

My parents helped me to lose my virginity

When he was 16, Boris Fishman and his girlfriend felt ready to have sex but he wanted the setting to be right and there was nowhere to go. Then he had an idea ...

• Boris Fishman
• The Guardian, Friday 12 September 2014 14.30 BST

Boris Fishman … 'I wanted it to resemble the epic lovelorn couplings in Marquez's books.'

We were each other’s firsts. I was 16, a stressed-out immigrant kid, she was the daughter of Colombian Catholics who were quite fond of the church’s policy on pre-marital sex. So it took us quite a while to awkwardly, semi-defeatedly concede to each other that we had run out of excuses to avoid sex. “This weekend?” I said grimly.

“Your house?” she said.

On Saturday morning, when the springtime sun finally made a strong showing outside after a dreary, wet winter, I came downstairs, where my parents and maternal grandmother were gathered around breakfast, and asked, as casually as I could: “Are you guys doing anything tonight?”

My father, not one for socialising or reading between the lines, wrinkled his forehead and said: “No?”

But my mother, who reads between the lines, needed only one look at me to say: “Of course!” She didn’t know why she was being asked, but she knew she was being asked.

“Why not go out for dinner?” I said, feeling guilty. “My treat.” Since arriving from the Soviet Union a decade before in 1988, none of our immigrant habits had eased; we almost never ate out – too expensive.

But I had been hoarding dollars from my summer jobs landscaping and lifeguarding. My offer must have indicated to my mother how badly I wished for the thing I was asking.

“But we’re not going anywhere tonight,” my father repeated, confused. My mother smacked his arm with the back of her hand: “Yes, we are.”

My grandmother only lolled her head, smiling. Whatever the adventure, she was in, as long as it included the family. (She had lost most of hers in the Holocaust.)

With curiosity, scepticism and goodwill, my parents and grandmother piled into the cramped, rusty Buick that was our first car in America and fumed off to whatever discount place they were going to for dinner. Newly permitted to drive, I jumped into our other car and sped off to a linen shop, in one of the nondescript shopping malls that surrounded our town like a blockading army.

I had been reading quite a bit of Gabriel García Márquez – my girlfriend’s compatriot – and I wanted her first time to resemble the epic, lovelorn couplings in his books. I wasn’t sure how things would hold up at my end, so at least everything else could be perfect.

After buying sheets (surely, I was the only unaccompanied 16-year-old male in the store), I stopped at the florist’s and asked for two dozen roses, rapidly depleting the funds I had set aside for my family’s dinner. I was so anxious that I gashed a finger trying to open the cellophane packaging in which the sheets were packed. I laid them down and wondered how tacky it was for the folding creases to show. Márquez had said nothing about folding creases. I tore the sheets back off the bed, yanked my mother’s ironing board from the hallway closet and got to work, the clock marching forward without mercy. My girlfriend was almost due and my family surely soon after that.

I gashed another finger plucking the petals off the thorn-riddled roses. (You thought I was going to give my girlfriend the flowers? No, like a maestro unveiling his circus, I would peel back the bedspread to reveal … fresh sheets covered in rose petals!)

Trying desperately not to bleed all over the enterprise, I stretched the ironed sheets over the mattress, scattered 300 rose petals on top and covered it all with the bedspread.

The main event was nothing like my literary hero had promised: primarily, we were relieved it was over. Now we could savour the falsely sweet memory of a milestone achieved. We turned on the television, called the diner and ordered a takeaway.

However, there was no sign of the adults. It was dark by now; I couldn’t imagine them choosing a restaurant that took serious time with its meals. There was no such place in our town, in any case.

They weren’t back when I drove my girlfriend home and they weren’t back by the time I returned. Eleven turned to midnight to 1am, and I turned from amusement to worry to terror at having consigned my family to catastrophe all because I wanted to lose my virginity.

I paced the living room and waited.

Boris Fishman’s parents, Anna and Yakov.

Though I would be unable to explain the feeling until many years later, the unease in my chest that evening had less to do with the awkwardness of a first coupling than the knowledge that it had been an obligation performed by two young people who felt a tremendous amount of affection for each other and desperately wished that could be enough.

I wrote my first poems for Gloria and she listened patiently to my complaints about the pressures of all that was expected from me at home. She came to my tennis matches and I wrote her term papers. But there were too many silent moments between us and the fact that our parents did not see us together – a Catholic and a Jew – only deepened the gloom. Our parents’ opinions mattered to us with all the weight they suspected was lacking.

Gloria and I would never regret that we had given ourselves to each other, but among the many other lessons with which adulthood awaited us was the news that for a life together it was not enough to love someone; you had to like them, too.

She was one year older than me and when she went off to college we unravelled. All the same, when I went to college, my mother demanded to know whether I had chosen it because it was only half an hour from where Gloria was studying.

“It’s Princeton, Ma,” I said. “Who cares why I chose it?” (I had selected Princeton because it offered the most financial assistance and because my parents would be footing the bill). But having spent their formative years in a country that lied to and abused its citizens, especially if they were Jewish, my parents were always alert to a con, even from their own flesh and blood.

As for Gloria, we reconnected several years ago after more than a decade. We have dinner every few months, each meeting as if no time has passed. The intense feelings that we experienced in those impressionable years have left us with a seemingly ineradicable tenderness available only to people like us. Sometimes I wonder: would we have stood a chance if we had ignored our parents about our relationship, too? There is no way to know.

So, this is adulthood: being old enough to have questions that will never be answered. Now, the parents listen only sometimes. Gloria and I laugh and commiserate about it when we meet at dinner. In those moments, our friendship feels like a secret and a gift.

But back to that spring night in 1996. When I heard the garage-door rumble open at 2am, I leapt off the couch where I was napping fitfully and burst through the connecting door in the front hallway.

“Where were you?!” I demanded like a parent sighting children who had violated their curfew. “It’s 2am!”

“We wanted to give you your time,” my mother said, taken aback.

“Where were you?” I demanded.

Recent immigrants don’t eat out, not if someone in the family is paying (my pocket was as good as their own, as far as they were concerned). They had spent seven hours parked in the lot outside Shop Rite down Hamburg Turnpike, next to the diner from which my girlfriend and I had ordered food. They had made sandwiches. They snacked on turkey slices with mayo and cucumber and talked about all the things they wished their only son to achieve. Seven hours they had talked and they could have gone on until dawn.

On writing a column - Credibility of political pundits is low but voters’ need for punditry high

By Vinod Mehta in The Times of India

Soon, the NDA government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi will chalk up 100 days in office. For some mysterious reason this magic figure is considered an appropriate moment by the media to take stock. It is a rite of passage.

One expects that the verdict on his performance will be sharply divided. One take on the report card will show BJP scoring a century in as many days. The other take will give the party half a ton, and another will award the government less than pass marks. In a robust democracy with a lively media, all three perspectives must be seriously examined before final evaluation is made. The difficulty for citizens is they lack the tools and instruments to make an informed judgment.

So, what options does the voter have? He can speak with friends. He can go online. He can tap a person who has a reputation for being knowledgeable in such matters. But most, i suspect, will rely on the media pundit in the shape of the opinion page writer. I would go so far as to say that political commentary is the main resource available to most people to help them make up their mind.

So far so good. Unfortunately, at this precise moment a problem arises. Recently, i was talking to an old colleague, and i told him i had read an article by Mr X which i liked. “Oh, he is not to be believed,” he replied. “He gets all his information from xxx” And he then mentioned the name of a minister in the present government. My interlocutor added that the gentleman we were talking about had an axe to grind, an `agenda`. Accordingly, what he wrote needed to be taken with a shovel of salt.

Frankly, we live in such ‘interesting’ times that it is virtually impossible to locate a commentator without an agenda. An agenda-less commentator is an endangered species. Which brings us back to the luckless citizen looking for views and positions he can put his faith in. Who does he turn to if all public affairs gurus are openly partial?

I will not be revealing any secrets when i say the credibility of the pundit is at an all-time low, if you exclude the Emergency. The prevailing atmosphere of suspicion and conspiracy theories is so toxic we should not be surprised by the strong inclination towards negativity in the people. As a result, even while he is perusing a 900-word column, the reader is wondering, “Why is this lying bugger lying to me?”

These days anyone who has spent a couple of years in the profession feels qualified to become a pundit. Nothing wrong with that, but the question is, what preparation did the said journalist make before he walked into the hallowed editorial space? When i became an editor in 1974, for over a decade i never dared to write an opinion piece. I was terrified because i felt too raw and too naive. Instead, i embarked on a course of self-education.

Sadly, there were, and are, no textbooks on column writing, no mass communication institutes which can teach you the craft. The sole guide: read pundits you admire — those with a standing for honesty and objectivity.

By objectivity i am not suggesting you abandon your prejudices and preferences, but keep them in check. And, sometimes, restrain them if the message on the wall is too clear. Pseudo-secularists and assorted Modi-detesters could not ignore the hawa blowing in his favour across the country in 2013. Whatever your predilections, you had to take note of the wind whose intensity was growing by the week.

If i can identify one quality the reader is looking for in an opinion column it is ‘trust’. The reader is aware from where the columnist is coming from, what his leanings are. Despite that, he needs to ‘trust’ the writer. He must feel confident the column, at the least, will acknowledge reality, not deny reality. In my 40-odd years of editorship the highest compliment paid to me, among zillions of abuses, went, “I don’t like your opinions but i don’t think you will deliberately mislead me.”

At a time when the entire media is increasingly perceived with suspicion, why should the column-writer remain uncontaminated by partisanship? After all, the pundit is a creature of the environment we all inhabit. He does not live on Mars.

The challenge for those privileged to contribute to the ‘heart of a newspaper’, then, becomes even more daunting. In a society where columnists and editors play favourites, the victim is the reader. Who looks after his interest? Media people day in and day out affirm their commitment to the reader, and the reader alone. Alas, the commitment doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

In short, truth and readability are essential for a column. Remember you don’t want to tell the truth in a way which puts your reader to sleep.

Is there any solution for the present depressing situation? I cannot easily think of one. However, if a solution exists it lies in the hands of the reader. He must reject those columnists (and the papers they write for) that flagrantly violate the basic canons of trust. The reader will be doing the media a favour and also the pundit, who must know he has been caught out.

What's behind team spirit?

Martin Crowe in Cricinfo

New Zealand gelled as a team int he 1992 World Cup but splintered thereafter © Getty Images

Teamwork, team spirit, team culture, team dynamics - all buzzwords that point to the same thing. Yet in truth it is the team "functionability" that must work if success is to be achieved and a legacy created. Sports teams are no different to business teams, except sport is played out in public and each individual player is under scrutiny, as much as the team's performance is.

In reality, most teams fail, if winning a championship or event or being ranked No. 1 is the measure they are judged by. Those few fortunate enough to hold the trophy aloft, let alone do it often and frequently, like the once all-conquering Manchester United, or the Australian cricket team of yesteryear, they are the ones that come together as one. As d'Artagnan famously said, "All for one and one for all."

There are thousands of opinions, hundreds of books, case studies and manuals on the subject worldwide. There are many ways to skin a cat. Yet really, when all is said and done, it is the simple methods of how people function best in everyday life that need to be executed in a sporting team environment. It comes down to how our relationships work in any form of life, and this points always to the ability to love, to talk, to listen and to commit. In short, to relate.

In my years of experiencing the good and the bad in relationships and teams, studying others, reading lots, and hearing grand and sad stories in all kinds of endeavour, the one thing that stands out more than anything is building and maintaining trust.

Trust stems from a willingness to openly share anything and everything. It is about not being afraid to show vulnerability, admitting mistakes and weaknesses, and generally and genuinely sharing the truth outwardly and honestly among the group. Trust rules the lot.

When it is not built, or is broken, then the essence of the team's functionality is lost. Great leaders and captains have been able to rely on this trust, once established, as the cornerstone to team success.

	Australia have always had the ability to work together even if one or two of the personalities clashed

Ian Chappell, the great Australian captain, would easily speak his mind, using his open-door policy style, by buying his team-mates a beer and sitting them down at the bar, loosening them up a little and getting a natural flow of conversation bedded in. He was famous for building that trust within his all-conquering team of the '70s by simply using straight honest talking and listening. In this he helped create the environment to challenge and debate with each other.

This is incredibly healthy, the key being that the trust generated leads to open challenging discussions and passionate debate based on respect. It doesn't mean you have to hold hands when doing so, just simply to speak your truth "out in the open", be heard, and take time to listen in turn. The worst thing is to speak your truth behind the backs of the team, in particular to the media and opposition. This kills trust, and it kills the desire to continue to share. Once trust and openness are broken, there is no chance going forward.

If the first two are working well, it will go a long way to solving any commitment issues. Committing or buying into the team's work is about the desire to go to great lengths to perform your specialist role for your team's benefit. When team members are allowed to share the truth, there is a natural tendency to buy in to committing wholeheartedly to the decisions made by the team's leaders.

Without commitment there is no accountability. When all are in, it becomes easier to call team members on actions and behaviours that will assist the team cause. When accountability becomes understood, then so too is the need to focus attention to the goals and results of the team. Accountability removes the individual needs, like personal recognition and ego, from the equation.

Australia had a great handle on this with their dominance through most of the 1990s and much of the following decade. They have always had that ability to work together even if one or two of the personalities clashed. This was the open positive conflict working well. West Indies, under Clive Lloyd, showed a real theme to their togetherness, small nations becoming one, and they displayed a spirit unrivalled for 15 long years.

Through the '80s, New Zealand had a mixture of good and bad, but mainly positive functionality. Sometimes there was a lack of attention to team results and accountability, but overall there was an enduring trust, openness and commitment.

	West Indies, under Clive Lloyd, showed a real theme to their togetherness - small nations becoming one © PA Photos  Enlarge

In my term as a Test captain, I didn't allow for enough open debate and sharing, and so we had little trust to start with, and the rest of the dysfunctions followed. My failure was in not generating enough open conflict to ensure everyone had a say, bought in, and truly committed. However, it did come slowly, so by the time of the 1992 World Cup, we had nearly all five functions working smoothly.

Sadly, rather than building on that success, we splintered dramatically, the catalyst being the bomb blast outside our hotel in Colombo in late 1992, an incident that split the team in two when six players and the coach, with families at home, left the tour. From then, as a team, we were damaged goods. Administrators got involved, wrongly, and developed hideous resentment. Over just a few months all the trust we had garnered started to evaporate.

By February 1993, factions were everywhere and our team dynamic was dead. The coach, Wally Lees was sacked for very little reason. Mark Greatbatch was inexplicably replaced as vice-captain, and therefore I lost my trusted lieutenant, and before long, after just one more Test in charge, my tenure as skipper was over too. The team spirit suffered.

My last seven Tests, as a mere batsman not knowing how to retire, were the saddest of all that I played, as I watched a team pretend it existed. There wasn't one ounce of trust. That positive team dynamic never rose again for New Zealand until Stephen Fleming began his own team-building with a young bunch of mates and an experienced and inspirational management, from 1998 to 2003.

The point is, anything can disrupt the dynamic, and so it's vital that whatever happens, or whoever comes into the group, the five functions must be quickly and often referred to: Motivation for maintaining the flow of attention to results; accountability; commitment; open, honest and respectful conflict; and sharing truths - these make the lifeblood of a team's fulfilment and longevity.

In God we trust - all others bring data. The perils of data-driven cricket -

 

For all his triumphs as England coach, Andy Flower ultimately got the balance between trusting people and numbers wrong

Tim Wigmore in Cricinfo

March 2, 2014

 

Was Andy Flower ultimately empowered by data or inhibited by it? © PA Photos

Cricket is an art, not a science. It's a fact that needs restating after the disintegration of Andy Flower's reign as England coach. Slavery to data had gone too far. The triumphs of the more jocund Darren Lehmann, Flower's coaching antithesis, are a salutary reminder of the importance of fun and flair in a successful cricket team. And it's not only cricket that could learn from the tale.

Big data - the vogue term used to describe the manifold growth and availability of data, both structured and not - is an inescapable reality of the 21st century. There are 1200 exabytes of data stored in the world; translated, that means that, if it were all placed on CD-ROMs and stacked up, it would stretch to the moon in five separate piles, according to Kenneth Cukier and Viktor Mayer-Schonberger's book Big Data. Day-to-day life can often feel like a battle to stay afloat against the relentless tide of data. One hundred and sixty billion instant messages were sent in Britain in 2013. Over 500 million tweets are sent worldwide every day.

Kevin Pietersen was the subject of a good number of those after his sacking as an England cricketer. Amid the cacophony of opinions, one voice we could have done without was David Cameron's; the prime minister gave a radio interview saying that there was a "powerful argument" for keeping the "remarkable" Pietersen in the team.

Cameron had once recognised the dangers of descending into a roving reporter, promising, "We are not going to sit in an office with the 24-hour news blaring out, shouting at the headlines." Downing Street's impulse to comment on the Pietersen affair is a manifestation of information overload at its worst: with so much space to fill, politicians feel compelled to fill it. The result is that they have less time to do their day jobs.

	Flower's reign, for the most part, showed the virtues of using data smartly. But data is emphatically not a substitute for intuition and flair - either in the office or on the cricket field

Datafication often brings ugly and perverse consequences. The easiest way to reduce poverty is to give people just enough money to inch them ahead of an arbitrarily defined definition of poverty, rather than tackle the deep-rooted and more complex causes. Schools are routinely decried for a narrow-minded approach to education - "teaching to the test" - but this is the inevitable result of the obsession with standarised tests. California has pioneered performance-related pay for teachers, but a huge rise in teacher-enabled cheating has been one unforeseen result.

No industry has been permeated by datafication quite like the financial sector. The complex - oh, so complex - algorithms that underpinned the financial system had a simple rationale. In place of impulsive human beings, decision-making would be transferred to formulas that dealt only in cold logic, ensuring an end to financial catastrophes. We know what happened next. Yet the crash has changed less than is commonly supposed: around seven billion shares change hands every day on US equity markets - and five billion are traded by algorithms.

The Ashes tour felt like English cricket's crash. The numbers said that it couldn't possibly happen; those who spotted the warning signs were belittled as naysayers letting emotions cloud their judgement. The Ashes series was caricatured as the triumph of the old school - Lehmann's penchant for discussing the day's play over a beer - over Flower's pseudo-scientific approach. While clearly a simplification - Lehmann is no philistine when it comes to data - the accusation contains a grain of truth.

Flower's attraction to big data originated from reading Moneyball, the book that examined how the scientific methods of Oakland Athletics manager Billy Beane helped the baseball team punch above its financial limitations. But it is too readily forgotten that the Oakland Athletics ran out of steam in knockout games. "My shit doesn't work in the playoffs," Beane exclaimed. "My job is to get us to the playoffs. What happens after that is luck." Not even Beane found an empirical way of measuring flair, spontaneity and big-game aptitude.

After the debris of England's tour Down Under, The Sun published its list of the 61 "guilty men" - including 29 non-players - involved in England's Ashes tour. It was hard not to ask what on earth the backroom staff was doing. And, more pertinently, if England's total touring party had numbered only 51 or 41, could England really have performed any worse? The proliferation of specialist coaches and analysts seemed antithetical to the self-expression of players on the pitch.

	The selection of Finn, Rankin and Tremlett for the Ashes was proof of the pitfalls of the reliance on bogus statistics © Getty Images  Enlarge

Similar questions are being asked in different fields. The average businessman now sends 108 emails a day. But, as inboxes get bigger, so opportunity for creativity decreases. This reality is slowly being recognised: a multi-million dollar industry has grown around filtering emails to liberate businessmen from the grind. The world is running into the limits of Silicon Valley's favoured mantra "In God we trust - all others bring data."

No one would advocate pretending that big data doesn't exist. Datafication is happening at a staggering rate - the amount of digital data doubles every three years. Flower's reign, for the most part, showed the virtues of using it smartly. But data is emphatically not a substitute for intuition and flair - either in the office or on the cricket field.

By the last embers of Flower's rule, England seemed not empowered by data but inhibited by it, as instinct, spontaneity and joy seeped from their cricket. Accusations of England lacking flair on the field had a point - witness Alastair Cook's insistence on having a cover sweeper regardless of the match situation. Going back to 2011, consider England's approach to tying down Sachin Tendulkar in the home series against India: they relied on drawing Tendulkar outside his off stump in the early part of his innings rather than let him get his runs on the on side, the result of a computer simulator plan, created by their team analyst Nathan "Numbers" Leamon.

The selection of three beanpole quick bowlers to tour Australia was rooted in data showing that such bowlers were most likely to thrive in Australia. The ECB looked at the characteristics of the best quick bowlers - delayed delivery, braced front leg and so on, and then tried to coach those virtues into their own players, seemingly not realising it was too late; you can't change those things once bowlers are more than about 15. But it did not matter how many boxes Steven Finn, Boyd Rankin and Chris Tremlett ticked in theory when they were utterly bereft of fitness and form in practice. It was proof of the pitfalls of excess devotion to data and reliance on bogus statistics. "Garbage in, garbage out," as some who work with data are prone to saying.

Data is a complement to intuition and judgement, not a replacement for them. As Cukier and Mayer-Schonberger argue in their study, big data "exacerbates a very old problem: relying on the numbers when they are far more fallible than we think".

Criticisms of Flower's reliance on data always lingered under the surface, as when South Africa expressed bafflement when Graham Onions was dropped for Ryan Sidebottom in 2010, a data-driven decision largely made before the tour even began. For all his triumphs as England coach, Flower ultimately got the balance between trusting people and numbers wrong. He was in good company. In the brave new world, those who thrive will not be those who use data most - but those who use it most smartly.

Understanding Germany and its Mittelstand ethos

Germany is right: there is no right to profit, but the right to work is essential

The strength of Germany lies in its medium-sized manufacturing firms, whose ethos includes being socially useful

• 
• • John Studzinski
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 6 February 2013

'The objective of every German business leader is to earn trust – from employees, customers, suppliers and society as a whole.' illustration by Belle Mellor

 

People talk too much about the economy and not enough about jobs. When economists, academics and bankers are allowed to lead the debate, the essential human element goes missing. This is neither healthy nor practical.

Unemployment should be our prime concern. Spain, with youth joblessness close to 50%, is in the gravest crisis, but there is hardly a government on the planet that is not wondering what it can do to guide school-leavers into work, exploit the skills of older workers, and avoid the apathy and alienation of the jobless, which undermines not just the economy but also the social fabric.

There may be no definitive answer but, over the past half-century, Germany has come closest to finding it. Its postwar economic miracle was impressive, but its more recent ability to ride out recessions and absorb the costs of reunification is, perhaps, even more remarkable. Germany was not immune to the economic crisis of 2008-9, but the jobless rate rose more slowly than elsewhere in Europe. Although in recent months it has edged up towards 6.9%, it remains well below the euro area's 11.7% average. Germany's resilience springs from the strength of its medium-sized, often family-owned manufacturing companies, collectively known as the Mittelstand, which account for 60% of the workforce and 52% of Germany's GDP. So what can we learn from the Germans?
The enduring success of the Mittelstand has been well documented but rarely emulated. The standard excuse is that it is rooted in German history and culture and therefore unexportable. At a time when so much business is conducted on a global scale, via globally accessible media, this excuse is wearing thin.

Let me highlight some of the features unique to the Mittelstand model that I believe everyone should learn from – and imitate if they can. The first is what we might call the Mittelstand ethos – that business is a constructive enterprise that aims to be socially useful. Making a profit is not an end in itself: job creation, client satisfaction and product excellence are just as fundamental. Taking on debt is treated with suspicion. The objective of every business leader is to earn trust – from employees, customers, suppliers and society as a whole. This ethos chimes with the values of prudence and responsibility with which every schoolteacher hopes to imbue their pupils. Consequently, about half of all German high-school students move on to train in a trade. Business and education are natural bedfellows.

The second essential feature of the Mittelstand model is the collaborative spirit that generally exists between employer and employees. This can be dated back to the welfare state that Chancellor Otto von Bismarck established in the late 19th century to head off what he saw as the menace of socialism. Its modern-day equivalent is the system of works councils, which ensures that employees' interests are safeguarded, whether or not they belong to a trade union. German workers expect their employers to keep training them, enhancing their skills. In the post-reunification recession, it seemed only natural to German workers to offer flexibility on wages and hours in return for greater job security. More recently the government protected jobs by subsidising companies that cut hours rather than staff.

A third feature of the Mittelstand model is the determination of German companies to build for the long term. To this end, they tend to keep core functions such as engineering and project management in-house, while outsourcing production whenever this proves more efficient. Mittelstand companies are overwhelmingly privately owned, and thus largely free of pressure to provide shareholder returns. This makes them readier to innovate, and invest a larger proportion of their revenues in R&D. There are Mittelstand companies that file more patents in a year than do some entire European countries. It is one of the underlying reasons for their exporting success, even when their goods seem expensive.
Finally, German companies work closely with their suppliers. This has proved especially valuable in developing Sino-German trade. Unlike most of their international competitors, they are happy to take suppliers' representatives on trade missions. The result is that they can guarantee swift and sure supplies of components and other products. Chinese customers are not the only ones willing to pay extra for this kind of service excellence.

Of course, there are other factors that lie behind the success of the Mittelstand and of the German economy as a whole. Both the economy and political system are highly decentralised, with the result that local banks, businesses, entrepreneurs and politicians know and understand each other, making everyday co-operation easier – while, at the national level, Germany's leaders rarely miss an opportunity to promote their country's industry abroad.

Nonetheless, there is much that non-Germans could learn from. To close the gap between education and business, companies should take a greater interest in their local schools and colleges. If you haven't got spare cash for sponsoring gyms or computer equipment, go and talk to sixth-formers or degree students about what you do. Find out what graduates aspire to. It will help you to work out how to attract the next generation.

If you want to get more out of your employees and suppliers, consult them; invite them into your confidence. Don't complain: "We're not like the Germans. It won't work here." Think of a different way. Try harder.

The same applies to governments. Let me mention one simple legislative option. In German law, the owner of a family business who passes it on to the next generation can avoid paying inheritance tax if, during their tenure, they have increased employment and thereby benefited the economy. What better signal could a government give than by favouring those who create employment?

There is no question in my mind about which is the single most important feature of the Mittelstand model – its underlying ethos, which is based not on dry economic theory, but on everyday, practical humanity. The notion that business should be socially useful may have sprung from Germany's postwar conscience, but it has resonance now, when so many of our citizens are still suffering from the aftermath of the credit crunch and the failures of leadership it exposed.

There is no right to make a profit, and profit has no intrinsic value. But there is a right to work, and it is fundamental to human dignity. Without an opportunity to contribute with our hands or brains, we have no stake in society and our governments lack true legitimacy. There can be no more urgent challenge for our leaders. The title of the next G8 summit should be a four-letter word that everyone understands – jobs.