The England setup seems to be lacking the innovation, imagination and variety of voices that moves a team forward
With an impeccable sense of timing, Ashley Giles flies into Sydney next week to join up with the England squad ahead of the fourth Ashes Test. I know what you’re all thinking: if only he’d arrived earlier. How differently things might have panned out had the “Managing Director, England Men’s Cricket” been able to effect his unique brand of managerial direction earlier in the series? Perhaps, like Glenn McGrath in 2005 or John Snow in 1974-75, the Giles Effect (Conjecture) seems fated to remain an arresting counterfactual in the footnotes of Ashes history.
Instead, Giles arrives with the Ashes gone and English cricket in varying states of disarray. The captain, Joe Root, is said to be quietly seething at the manner of this defeat and the entirely foreseeable missteps that have led to it. Chris Silverwood, the man whom Giles decided to make the most powerful England coach of the 21st century, will probably end up leaving his job. However Tom Harrison, Giles’s boss and the chief executive of the England and Wales Cricket Board, still gets his share of a £2m bonus pot. So let’s charitably call it a mixed picture.