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The career of an England cricket coach is like that of a politician: it always ends in failure. David Lloyd went when England were dumped out in the group stages of the 1999 World Cup, Duncan Fletcher after they were knocked out in the second round in 2007, Peter Moores was sacked when England were thumped in the 2015 tournament and Andy Flower quit after the Test side were whitewashed by Australia in 2013-14. So of course, after England’s battering in the Ashes, Trevor Bayliss’s days are numbered. The surprise is that he has been able to choose the figure himself and set it quite so high. He has 600 or so to go.
Bayliss is not going to be fired or forced out. But he says he will step down when his contract runs out in September 2019, whether the team are “going well or not”. Bayliss thinks coaches have a five-year shelf-life and after that “a new voice, a different approach” is needed to reinvigorate the side. Which is likely to be right. In hindsight both Fletcher, who did eight years, and Flower, who did five, stayed on a little too long, and their teams suffered through a sorry final few months when both men fell out with some of the players and lost the support of the press and the public.
Darren Lehmann has said he plans to go around the very same time as Bayliss and has spoken about just how difficult the job of the head coach has become. “Too much time, too much travel,” Lehmann said. By the time Bayliss finally gets back to England in the spring, for instance, he will have been on the road for five months, from November to April. Bayliss is paid something in the region of £500,000 per year, so he will know there is a limit to how much sympathy he can expect. But the point stands that coaches can burn out, just as players do.
By talking about it, though, Bayliss has been too honest for his own good. Sound as his thinking is, he would have done better to serve up some ripe old platitude about concentrating on the next game instead of revealing so much about his plans. For a start a lot of England fans will think Bayliss is assuming a touch too much given that his team have just been walloped 4-0 by Australia and that their Test record since he took over is now P38, W15, D5, L18. It is not a strong position for a man making pronouncements about how long he plans to stay on.
It is also difficult to square Bayliss’s plan to quit in 2019 with the statements made by his assistant coach, Paul Farbrace, a couple of days ago. “If England are serious about coming back and winning in four years’ time,” Farbrace said, “the planning needs to start in the next couple of days.” Bayliss says he has “got no problem working towards a long-term goal, even if I’m not going to be there”. Which is not really the point. It does not matter if Bayliss has got a problem with that situation so much as whether his successor does.
The next coach may not want to build on foundations laid by another whose teams were trounced in away series against India and Australia. He may not agree with Bayliss that “[Joe]Root will still be there as captain” or that “there’s a base of six or seven players that will still be young enough to be in the team” when England go back to Australia in 2021. So while Farbrace wants the planning to start now, the degree to which it really does will depend on how well this coaching regime dovetails with the one that comes after it.
There are good candidates in the England set-up already. Farbrace would be one himself except that he has been with England longer than Bayliss and will be just as familiar to the players and fatigued by all the travel. Paul Collingwood and Chris Silverwood, who did such good work with Essex, have a lot to recommend them, too. But again all that depends on whether Bayliss’s England can deliver in the 2019 World Cup and the Ashes later that same summer because, if they fail, continuity will be the last thing anyone wants.
(GUARDIAN)
