In the past 20 years Ashes series have been career- defining moments for many England captains and coaches, but this tour has been weighed down more than most with misfortunes, mishaps and misjudgments. The debate about where it leaves Duncan Fletcher as coach and Andrew Flintoff as captain will probably rage until the end.
Fletcher is already under severe pressure. He has been coach for seven years. He is the longest-serving coach in international cricket, along with John Buchanan, who has already announced that he is stepping down after the World Cup.
If England go badly in that tournament after surrendering the Ashes, Fletcher will face many calls to give way to a younger man with fresh ideas. But he remains defiant. He said yesterday that he had a job to do and would carry on doing it. David Morgan, the chairman of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB), who knows him better than most, was adamant that Fletcher’s resignation was neither sought nor expected.
“He’s done a superb job for us,” Morgan said. “We’re in a bad patch here on this tour, but if a director in industry has a bad quarter, the last thing you do is sack him. He’s the best person to examine the problems and put solutions in place. I don’t accept that the way the first two Tests went should be totally upon his shoulders. I’m not anticipating him saying he’s had enough.”
Morgan said he had spent an hour with Fletcher in the dressing room at the Waca on the first day and found him unchanged. “He was in his normal form. He’s a very resilient guy, a tough cookie. He’ll be disappointed with the performances but certainly won’t be overawed by the criticism. I’m sure he can handle it, though it’s always wearing. In the last Ashes series Australia didn’t win a match after the first one. Did they sack their coach? No.”
Fletcher’s line has always been that he would give up when he felt he could no longer help the players, and that doesn’t appear to be the case at present. Only 11 days ago he said: “I think I’ve got the support of everyone in the team.”
Fletcher said last night that his players felt they hadn’t done themselves justice in Australia, a view few would dissent from. “We just feel we haven’t played as well as we could,” he said. “Some batters haven’t performed and they appreciate they haven’t performed. The bowlers have lifted their game to some degree but know they can perform better.”
Flintoff, the stand-in captain for the injured Michael Vaughan, may be more vulnerable. Fletcher claims that his allrounder still has a smile on his face, but Flintoff’s form with bat and ball has clearly suffered. Rather like Ian Botham was, he seems diminished by the responsibilities of captaincy rather than uplifted.
“We spoke to Fred before he came out here and painted the picture about how difficult it would be and he was quite comfortable,” Fletcher said. “He’s still got a smile on his face.Captaining England is always going to be difficult, especially in Australia. He’s enjoyed the captaincy side of it, he’s just a little frustrated that he’s not made some runs.”
The difference for the two men is that whereas Flintoff retains a strong constituency of support among the wider public, Fletcher has few friends outside the small circle of ECB administrators who understand the revolution he has overseen since 1999.
The Zimbabwean’s management style threatens to leave him sorely exposed. When he took over, the responsibility for running the national team was confused, spreading beyond the coach to administrators whose relationship with the players was fraught with mistrust.
Fletcher changed all that: the buck was to stop with him and anyone not directly involved with the team was excluded from what he dubbed the “bubble”. Even David Graveney, the chairman of selectors, found difficultly gaining access to the dressing room. Fletcher built his team on new lines. He became big on identifying “character”.
Taking soundings from a select group of contacts among players and umpires around the shires, he set about establishing which cricketers had the fighting spirit. If they didn’t have the stomach for battle, he wasn’t interested, no matter how talented. Performances in county cricket suddenly became less important; the traditional measures of a player’s worth, batting and bowling averages, went out of the window. Those with promise were fast-tracked to the new national academy.
It was an admirable policy and reaped rich rewards down the years, but the flaw was that the judgments of the inner circle were hard to countermand and Fletcher preferred to work with his players in the nets rather than put them through the rigours of county cricket.
Critics accused him of devaluing a worthy institution and leaving his star players short of match practice. Among them was Geoff Boycott. Three years ago he wrote a newspaper article listing Fletcher’s shortcomings as coach. The normally taciturn Fletcher was moved to respond with a piece of his own. In the past few weeks Boycott has been back on the attack, calling on Fletcher to be removed as coach and saying “this (England) set-up just seems too cosy”.
Another old foe has recently returned to haunt Fletcher. Rod Marsh, the plain-speaking Australian who ran the national academy, found himself at loggerheads with the coach. Marsh, naturally, championed the cause of his young charges, but Fletcher wasn’t always ready to share his enthusiasm.
Chris Read’s selection as wicketkeeper was the first flash-point. After a modest winter with the bat, Fletcher, in conjunction with Vaughan, the captain, wielded the axe and brought in Geraint Jones in Antigua. Marsh was livid, claiming that as a member of the selection panel he ought to have been consulted.
Graveney was obliged to formulate a selection protocol outlining how England teams were chosen. At home Fletcher, Graveney, Geoff Miller and Marsh would choose the team; overseas, the task lay solely with the coach and captain. Marsh still wasn’t happy and las- year resigned first from the panel, then from the academy.
During the Brisbane Test, in a newspaper column, he publicly gave Fletcher the full force of his opinion. He accused him of shabbily treating Read, who had been briefly recalled to the team in England before being jettisoned again once the team reached Australia and Fletcher’s writ ran large. He also slated Fletcher for picking Ashley Giles ahead of Monty Panesar (another of Marsh’s former academicians). Marsh has since called on Fletcher to be removed as a selector (Buchanan, Australia’s coach, is not a selector). He has also said that he expects Australia to win the series 5-0.
However intransigent Fletcher has been, he has scarcely deserved such petulant outbursts, and there’s no doubt that some of Marsh’s comments have been designed for domestic consumption in Australia, where not everyone is overjoyed at the part he played in helping England regain the Ashes.
Fletcher makes a ready target for all Australians. He is not quite Douglas Jardine, but there are parallels. Like Jardine, he ran a masterly tactical campaign, and like Jardine, he has an aloof manner. When Fletcher praised his players for the way they had played Shane Warne, Warne took great pleasure in ramming the words back down his throat after Australia won in Adelaide. Fletcher had committed the cardinal sin of showing himself cleverer than Australians, and is paying the price.
Fletcher and Flintoff came to Australia to defend the Ashes, and boy have they defended. Their selection policy has been cautious from the start. Indeed, almost a year ago, Fletcher and Vaughan decided that the players who had won the Ashes deserved the right to defend the urn Down Under. It was the old “character” test again: they had won in the hardest arena, so who better to go out and do it again. Basically, if you had the MBE, you were in the side.
But this was awkward. Jones had lost form with the bat and had been dropped in England for Read, who had made runs in two Tests but crumbled under pressure in one-dayers. Six days after arriving in Australia, Fletcher announced that he and Flintoff were going back to Jones. This needed justifying and Fletcher arguably went too far in saying that they felt Jones handled the big moments better and was technically better on Australian pitches. He had broken his golden rule of not talking down his players in public. To make matters worse, Jones’s technique was quickly shown as inadequate in Australia.
More contentiously, Giles was preferred to Panesar as the spinner in Brisbane and Adelaide. Giles had barely played cricket for a year while Panesar, in 10 Tests against three Asian sides, had got out some of the finest players of spin in the world. Fletcher has always been deeply sceptical about the worth of finger-spinners and therefore wanted them contributing with the bat and in the field. Giles had scored runs for England in the past and was a safe fielder. But in the first two Tests he was innocuous with the ball and showed his ring-rustiness when he dropped Ricky Ponting 35 runs into his innings of 142 in Adelaide.
Fletcher said last night that he didn’t regret any decisions he had made during the series. “We’ve been quite comfortable with who we’ve picked,” he said.
The media tried to pin the decision on Fletcher alone, but Flintoff confirmed that he was happy with Giles’s inclusion. Nevertheless, the two broke another rule of selection — keeping faith with players who have done well. This logic was used to justify Flintoff’s selection as captain, Graveney saying: “He was in possession and deserved a further opportunity.” They could have said this about Panesar, but didn’t.
Steve Harmison was also being treated with kid gloves. He was short of cricket, too, after finishing the English season with a sore back and bowled so poorly in the Champions Trophy that he was left out of the final game. Then, after feeling a twinge in his back on the morning of the final warm-up in Adelaide, he was left out to undergo a scan that showed nothing. He could have been named in the side and bowled later in the game, but England missed the trick and as a result Harmison went into the first Test in Brisbane hopelessly undercooked.
His nightmare first-day performance, symbolised by his first wide ball straight to Flintoff at second slip, set the tone for a disastrous first three days to the series.
England’s caution was also evident in Perth on Friday, when Kevin Pietersen, batting with the lower order, was told to play a cautious game rather than go into attack mode. As a result he dealt largely in singles for an hour after lunch until Matthew Hoggard was out and Pietersen finally went on the offensive. He publicly said he was happy with the tactics, but privately he was fuming.
Even if Fletcher and Flintoff haven’t been at loggerheads in the way the media tried to portray them, their relationship hasn’t been as obviously comfortable as the coach’s alliances with Nasser Hussain and Michael Vaughan. But those two captains were strong men, appointed to lead. Flintoff is a stand-in, who will probably give way if Vaughan returns. This has made it hard to make long-term plans. Since the 2005 Ashes, Fletcher has worked with four Test captains — Vaughan, Trescothick, Flintoff and Strauss. The upshot has been that boldness has given way to caution.
There have been extenuating circumstances. The schedule was a killer. The Australia tour was sandwiched between the Champions Trophy — a blatant money-spinner if ever there was one — and the World Cup, which meant England’s lead-up to the opening Test on November 23 was confined to a one-dayer and two three-day games. When England were predictably dumped out of the Champions Trophy 10 days before the final, the logical thing would have been to proceed straight from India to Australia for extra practice. Instead, the players returned to England for five days at home. An ECB spokesman said yesterday that the board was tied into the agreed schedule and had no alternative. A 50-overs match against a Prime Minister’s XI had been billed as the tour opener and could not be pre-empted by the late addition of an earlier fixture. He said England would face the same dilemma on the next Ashes tour in 2010-11, when a World Cup is also in the calendar.
Had England been a better one-day team, they might have got into shape with a long run in the Champions Trophy (as Australia did in winning the event for the first time). By crushing England in a group match in Jaipur, however, Australia went a long way towards scuttling the opposition vessel.
Meanwhile, England’s traditional Ashes misfortune with injuries had returned after their golden run in 2005, when they were able to get through the whole series with 12 players. Now almost half of their Ashes winners were gravely afflicted. Vaughan’s dodgy right knee required surgery. A hip problem that had troubled Giles during the Ashes summer flared again and needed repairing. Controversially, both had attempted early comebacks and suffered setbacks.
Simon Jones, perhaps the most influential bowler in the defeat of Australia, had continued his miserable fortune with injuries and been forced to undergo surgery on his left knee that ruled him out of the tour five months beforehand.
Flintoff reported renewed pain in his left ankle and was also put under the surgeon’s knife. The medics estimated his recuperation at 12 weeks, although when Glenn McGrath was laid low by a similar condition, he had been out for the best part of a year.
Then there was Marcus Trescothick, the man who had been originally thrust the captain’s mantle when Vaughan missed matches during last winter’s tours on the subcontinent. Trescothick had been on the international treadmill six years and, unlike Flintoff, was equivocal about the joys of stand-in captaincy. Four days before he was due to lead out England in the first Test in India in March, Trescothick walked on to a plane bound for home. It transpired he was suffering a stress-related condition, but he played in the summer’s home Tests. He was excused Champions Trophy duty but was declared fit for Australia.
The Australians, by contrast, were able to call on nine of the XI that had faced England at The Oval in September 2005 come the series opener at the Gabba.
What could Fletcher have done differently about this desperate rash of misfortunes? Not much, except be more sceptical about his players’ protestations of fitness. The Ashes had become such a huge event after the epic 2005 series that nobody wanted to miss out. So Giles assured everyone that he would be okay, even though he had not played a Test match for a year. So did Vaughan, who wasn’t fit for the Ashes but came to Australia anyway in the hope that his rehab might take a sudden turn for the better.
Trescothick arrived in Australia and stayed nine days before a distressing breakdown in the dressing room at Sydney led to his departure, this time possibly for good.
Flintoff was simply too important to the whole expedition to be treated as a normal case and touched down in Australia with four one-day innings and five overs under his belt in three months. With his first press conference, he set the tone for the tour. It was short to the point of curtness and conceded nothing. One of the most attacking cricketers of his day was clearly intent on being ultra- defensive.
England had only three short warm-up matches to get miles into people’s legs. It had turned into a crazily optimistic venture. Once Trescothick left, only three of the squad had played Ashes Tests in Australia before — Matthew Hoggard, Harmison and Giles. Their experience was going to be invaluable, or so everyone thought.
