Since England lost to India last weekend attention has turned towards Australians – the team England are going to play in Ahmedabad on Saturday, and the one in their dressing room. With England’s World Cup defence having turned into a calamity there will inevitably be conversations about whether Matthew Mott, their Australian coach, can retain his position. I’d say the jury is very much out.
England’s problems go a lot deeper than Mott, but now he needs to react to them. He arrived at the World Cup with the nucleus of a great, experienced side but under the relentless examination of competition it has proved not to be a strength at all. I didn’t see it coming, but from a distance what has happened looks slightly familiar. I’ve been involved in the past with successful teams full of experienced professionals, and I’ve seen how over time they can lose their edge. I’ve witnessed the disintegration of the very professionalism and dedication that allowed a group of people to achieve success. Sometimes it is age, sometimes it is attitude, but at some point, without realising, professional sportspeople can just go over the threshold.
Experience is a positive in cricket: you come to know your game. You don’t necessarily do the volume of training you do when you’re young but it’s targeted, it’s quality, it keeps you on the edge and ready to perform. But there’s a fine line between that and when you go past that. Are you putting in the time to make sure you are physically in perfect condition, mentally focused, highly motivated, up for the battle? Or are you doing the minimum and then going to play a round of golf? You do wonder if the nucleus of this team has hit the other side of the boundary.
With so many players being off their game, England have suffered from the lack of a backup plan. Maybe the success the core of this team has had when they’ve dominated matches has contributed to their downfall, because they have lacked the ability to carve out scores in a different way. There are seven or eight very talented batters, but who is going to do the hard yards that will allow others to come in and bat with a bit more freedom? So far there has been no one. Since 2015 the attitude has been to go out and go hard come what may, even when they are wickets down – sometimes it won’t come off, but it is the best method more often than not. Suddenly it is not coming off at all, and there is no plan B.
In the middle of a series Mott’s job is to bolster people’s confidence, to support, encourage, and help them to get the best out of themselves. When batters are out of form they will want the opportunity in training to hit lots of balls out of the middle of the bat. But you also need variety, to keep practice interesting, and sometimes you need to push players. In Australia for the 2016-17 Ashes we played a succession of warmup games on fairly slow wickets, and didn’t face many bowlers of pace, but I knew we were about to go into a Test series against Pat Cummins, Mitchell Starc and Josh Hazlewood. So I asked for a lane in the nets where I could sling these slightly softer Kookaburra balls really fast, and every batter would have to face four overs. Some players were fine – Joe Root never backed off – but others were worried about doing it in front of the media and selectors, feeling they were being judged. The coach has to be clear with the players: it doesn’t matter if you struggle, the idea is to train very hard and then play a bit easier.
Mott should be pushing, stretching, trying to tease performances out of players. I hope he is trying different things: I’ve read Mott and his assistant coach, Marcus Trescothick, admitting they have no idea what England’s problem is, and I’m amazed and worried that coaches would say that in public. If they can’t turn around the form of their most experienced players perhaps they should just replace some of them. It strikes me that Harry Brook and Gus Atkinson have a strong case for playing the rest of the tournament: they’ve got bright futures, they’ve got a fresh attitude, and it’s not as if they’d be keeping out anyone who’s performing well. With the team of thirtysomethings that have lost the last two games what do England stand to gain from their remaining matches? What positives are going to come out?
Mott’s job is made much harder by Jos Buttler’s struggles. It is very difficult to captain a team when you are out of form yourself, and so far at the World Cup Buttler has not been the world-class batter we know him to be. His movements at the crease haven’t looked good, he’s out of balance, his shot selection has been off, and it is hard to lead by example when the example you are setting is so poor. Part of the captain’s role can be to pull senior players aside for an honest conversation, if for example he feels they are in a comfort zone – not to deliver a bollocking, but to say: “the team needs your help, what more can you find?” I wonder if his own struggles mean he feels unable to do that.
Maybe in the circumstances it may help that England are coming up against a team with which they have a lot of history – to play Australia and have a chance to give them a bloody nose may be precisely what this team needs. Before the tournament began I thought the Australians would struggle, and in their warmup series in South Africa they looked a disparate group, with no continuity of selection and no obvious gameplan. Perhaps it was unconscious bias, and deep down actively I wanted the five-time champions to come unstuck, but they are in this tournament big time. The other day I saw a replay of that moment in the 1999 semi-final where Herschelle Gibbs dropped Steve Waugh, who went on to score 120. Waugh said Gibbs had “just dropped the World Cup” – and then made him pay. He is still the template for the Australian way: ruthlessness personified, finding a way to win a game of cricket. In India they started slowly but they have grown into it, thanks to individual skill but also that same competitive spirit. It would be lovely if some of that could rub off on England, even if it’s a bit too late.
