Everyone is responsible; no one will be held accountable. Welcome to England cricket 3.0. White ball era: the after‑party. Actually, this isn’t the whole story. It turns out, with tour squads announced and executive briefing complete, that one person will be held accountable for England’s mind‑bogglingly flaccid 50-over World Cup defence.
That person is Dawid Malan, who was England’s best batsman during their mind-bogglingly flaccid World Cup defence, who now has the best England one-day international batting average of all time. And who has now been dropped from the team in all formats. Everyone is responsible for this mess; Dawid Malan will be held accountable. And this is fine.
So much for accountability. The next item on England’s immediate post-World Cup review is incoherent messaging, a topic first raised by Eoin Morgan. We hear so much about it. But what does incoherent messaging actually sound like in the flesh?
At which point, rewind to Eden Gardens on Friday, close to 10.30pm, with the sense already of things sliding into other things. Matthew Mott is standing at the bottom of a stairwell explaining for the first time why, under his watch, England’s world champions have performed like a team drained of will, competitive verve and any kind of plan. Here is summary of the things Matthew Mott said about this.
We did what we had to do.
I’m really impressed with the professionalism.
We had our backs right to the wall and we pulled out some good performances.
In many ways we’ve turned a corner.
A week after defeats against Afghanistan, Sri Lanka, New Zealand, India, South Africa and Australia, all by startling margins, Mott talked with a visible sense of pride about “character”, “fighting back” and (seriously) “true leadership”. He talked about tenacity and resilience. He said: “I couldn’t be prouder.”
And this is fine. It’s not Matthew Mott’s fault he sounds deluded when these words are set on a page. It’s not Matthew Mott’s fault he isn’t a good enough communicator to avoid sounding like this.
The big thing about Matthew Mott? He’s Matthew Mott. What were you expecting? Not Matthew Mott?
By the same token it’s not Matthew Mott’s fault that he feels no obligation to explain the collapse of a much-loved team, no emotional debt to England’s travelling fans, or those who care about and, in the end, pay for this thing. It’s not Matthew Mott’s fault his understanding of the role isn’t complete enough to see the need, when he speaks of his “learnings”, to share with the public some sense of what these might be. For the record that exchange ran like this:
Q Matthew you say you know what went wrong. Would it be a good idea to share some of that, given England came here as champions and finished seventh. Could you tell us two things you would change?
A No. No.
Q You don’t feel any duty as England coach to share your understanding of what went wrong?
A Whatever.
Q Really? No public duty at all?
A No.
In the interest of completeness Mott also announced, weirdly, in the middle of this, “I’m not going to be clickbait,” the only serious response to which is fond and heartfelt gales of laughter. Seriously bro. You’re pretty safe on that one. This stuff? This stuff isn’t bait. It’s barely click.
Why linger on any of it? Because the sense of disjunction here, of talent‑deficit, of a man speaking from inside someone else’s bubble, speaks to the wider energy of England’s World Cup, and indeed England cricket.
The only real story in these exchanges is a helpful demonstration, straight from the horse’s mouth, of how clarity is lost, of the stark difference between hyper-competence in sport versus those who merely fill the tracksuit. Where is the benefit, really, in blaming Mott for being Mott?
In an unexpected twist, this appeared to be pretty much Rob Key’s take on things too. It was the turn of England’s MD of men’s cricket to appear before the media morning, to offer not just the full tournament debrief and some squad selection chat but also a disarmingly honest mea culpa.
The message: don’t blame Matthew Mott. Blame me. I appointed Matthew Mott. And then I took away his ability to be the best Matthew Mott, something I did by being a hugely inexperienced administrator in a confusing job, whose greatest quality is exactly this kind of yes-the-ship-is-sinking captain’s honesty.
Zoom out and the story here remains the same, the sense that the dominant feeling around English cricket is powerlessness. Here is an entity operating in ever smaller circles of influence, pushed to the edge of its own summer, stretched around the globe in pursuit of the sun, but still just about upright at the dining table while the plaster is blown off the walls, the chandelier falls in the soup, the subaltern keels over into the mutton plate.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Key is the fact he is, by accident, pretty good at his job. Despite being a hunch-hire, an elevation by mate-ship, he has the intellect and the sense of gentleman-amateur clarity to speak freely, and to give the first honest – at times alarmingly honest – appraisal of what has happened in India, and of those responsible for it.
So Key said Mott’s only job is to improve his players, which he hasn’t done. He said “we have to get back to defining every single role,” because under Mott the roles have been undefined. He called out the basic inanity of fielding first in the furnace of Mumbai, an entry‑level judgment call in the under-13s, which “Matthew Mott should have known”. He said Mott’s England had “lost our identity” and had misunderstood how ODI cricket in India works, while at the same time “overthinking” things.
At which point, just as you wondered when and how the axe must surely fall, Key said: blame me. I put this coaching team in place. I made Tests the priority. This is basically who we have. This is what they have done with it. When life gives you Matthew Motts, you have little choice but to make Matthew Mott-ade.
There was a backhanded edge to this, with the addendum that Mott‑Buttler will get one just more chance to fail with the T20 World Cup looming. This seems sensible. England have the talent to compete. The Mott-Key crew may be able to find their rhythm by then.
Meanwhile, looming over all this is the real issue to have stalked the past few months, the sense that whatever the merits of the coaching staff this is an England World Cup that has taken place in the grip of wider forces just off-screen.
The problem is an existential one. As Key pointed out, the real issue for England cricket is not six defeats in nine but the fact Ben Stokes, the England and Wales Cricket Board’s greatest asset, has just turned down a three-year contract. The real reason the players are drained, wrung out, pulled in different directions is, essentially, the real‑time dissolution of international cricket itself.
Even as the days ticked down to that ODI title defence the ECB was bullied into a messy and distracting set of contract negotiations, a process that has cast a shadow not just over this World Cup but all the World Cups from here. Everyone is responsible. No one is accountable. In the middle of all this Matthew Mott probably deserves as much of a chance as anyone.
