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So Stephen Fleming has got the gig. It’s a Kiwi invasion! (Other than Brendon McCullum there’s also Jeetan Patel and Tim Southee on the coaching staff.) We debated on our recent podcast why it is that the most successful (England) Test coaches have been foreign (see table below), and why we tend to look overseas first when a new recruit is required. The reasons are:

1. The top English players of the past who might have made very good coaches tend to end up in the media. The likes of Nasser Hussain, Eoin Morgan, Michael Vaughan, Alastair Cook, Stuart Broad etc. It’s ‘safer’ in the media – there’s less responsibility or damage if you get something wrong – and its better paid! There’s more stability in TV.

2. Few English coaches get to work abroad. They don’t have the chance to broaden their experience and learn about different environments and cultures. That’s really important when coaching a Test team that travels far and wide. It was a deficiency that let Chris Silverwood down for instance.

3. There’s still an inherent belief in England that if you haven’t done it at Test level you can’t coach Test teams (although Trevor Bayliss belied that one, but he was an Aussie!)

So the choices are pretty stark. Jonathan Trott would have been considered (and has certainly done some hard yards coaching Afghanistan) but it may be too early in his coaching path and ditto Ian Bell. Andrew Flintoff was probably too close to Rob Key (reiterating the feeling of an old boys network) and maybe didn’t want it anyway. Richard Dawson perhaps didn’t have enough status at international level. So it came down to Justin Langer or Tom Moody or Stephen Fleming.

Fleming is a good choice. He is a man of huge experience and integrity (despite not having coached a red ball team to my knowledge). He played 111 Tests for New Zealand and captained them in 80 (when McCullum was just a player.) He is a calm, composed, shrewd personality, very unflustered, a modern thinker but a traditionalist at heart. He has shepherded Chennai Super Kings to five IPL titles, being MS Dhoni’s sounding board and adviser for a decade and more – meaning he will have built up a huge reservoir of experiences and scenarios. English players who have worked with him at CSK speak very highly of him.

I think Joe Root will work very well with him. Fleming will be the brains and detail behind Root’s dedication and productivity. There will be more discipline and structure, without it being onerous. England need that. But, as Matt Prior pointed out on the podcast, he will hopefully persuade Root to be a little more proactive and adventurous than he was during his last captaincy stint when, in a strange throwback to the bad old days of the 1970s, England failed to even attempt to chase 273 off 75 overs against New Zealand at Lord’s (in 2021.)

It’s a cliché but it is invariably true – New Zealand sportsmen and teams seem to make more of themselves just as their English counterparts tend to flatter to deceive. There is one fundamental reason – Kiwis (usually) have no ego. It’s a priceless asset, but one that English cricket has done well to reinvest in. An outbreak of common sense has penetrated the ECB asylum.

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An absolutely classic Joe Root innings - deft, busy, resilient, unselfish and utterly dependable – earned England a four wicket win over India at Cardiff, and stopped the rot. England had lost their last six odis against India and their 12 month record before today - P 10 W3 L 7 – was nothing to write home about either. They were deservedly 8th in the odi table and still are. Automatic qualification for the next World Cup is not assured.

It’s quite a contrast from the team led by Eoin Morgan a decade ago which led the world in odi method and intent and famously won England the World Cup (in 2019) for the first time. We made a film about it called The Greatest Game which you can watch here. Why the stark decline, and can it be arrested in time for the tournament in 14 months time in Southern Africa?

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I’m excited about the weekend. I’m not thinking about England v Norway or even the two final matches in the T20 series between England and India. I’m thinking about the first ever women’s Test match staged at Lord’s, England v India starting on Friday. There will be a pageant of former England women’s players. There will be unveilings of new paintings of former England stars. There will be commemorative caps presented and commemorative memorabilia for sale.

It is a seminal moment for cricket. It is not just a celebration of how far the women’s game has come since they were first ‘allowed’ to play at Lord’s in 1976 (above.) It’s also an acknowledgment of the efforts of thousands of women and girls who have not only risen above all sorts of obstacles to play the game but also score, umpire, coach, organise, prepare food, buy kit, wash kit, mend kit, ferry players around or just generally encourage boys and girls to play or watch. Women, it is fair to say, are the BEDROCK of cricket.

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Take a look at this clip above of the documentary The Greatest Game which I wrote and helped produce, chronicling England’s 2019 World Cup triumph. We spent two days filming with Ben Stokes and he was very open about his feelings in the lead up to and during that tournament. This segment is very revealing. It focuses on the crunch match during the World Cup when England, the overwhelming favourites, after losses to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Australia, had to defeat (unbeaten) India just to stay in the competition. It was, as the psychologists like to say, a fight or flight moment.

England employed a sports psychologist, David Young, to work with them during the competition. At this critical juncture he instigated a team meeting and implored each player to speak their mind. First up was Stokes. He was brutally honest. “I said ‘I’m nervous’” Stokes admitted. “I said ‘if we lose this game we are out of the World Cup. I know that and I don’t want that to happen.’ Sometimes you feel like you’re the only one who thinks like that. Everyone’s going to be thinking like that. Embrace it. Don’t let it swallow you up.”

What Stokes said had a profound impact on the team. Mark Wood, Stokes’ Durham teammate, summed up what they all felt. “I’d never heard Stokesy speak as he was vulnerable before. For a guy that I thought was pretty bulletproof, it was amazing to hear him say that.” The team responded brilliantly to him baring his soul, demolished India and of course went to lift the trophy for the first time in the nation’s history.

The point of regaling this story is a reminder that Stokes is a much more fragile character than his hard-man exterior suggests. I believe that explains his recent behaviour. He feels let down – by his teammates during the Ashes – and by a management who are still in their jobs despite appalling misjudgements before and during that series. Misjudgements that Stokes, as captain, drove himself to the bone to mitigate and had to carry the can for. He feels isolated as the only person in the team apart from the indefatigable Root who can compensate for their inadequacies and steer them away from the precipice. With the retirement of a number of senior players, the team is bereft of leaders. The pressure and expectation on Stokes is intolerable. Something had to give.

I was prompted to write this partly by a message I received from a former soldier who follows the game closely and has some of the same character traits as Stokes. He talks about suffering ‘black dog’ syndrome – a metaphor for depression, melancholy and a lingering sense of doom - recognising that in Stokes.

“I cannot remember a more removed, distanced or solitary England captain,” he says. “There is not a single leader amongst the other ten men. Cook, Gower, Hussain and Strauss had a posse of senior players they could confide in who were gnarled winners and captains of their counties in many instances. Stokes has some truly wonderful players but whose progress up the pathways has been managed in such a manner that they have never been in one place long enough to have been a captain.

“These ‘talents’ have great numbers but very few of the feats that contributed to those numbers involved grabbing the game by the scruff of the neck. The only possible foil is the wondrous Joe Root, a living testament to the burden of captaincy on the wrong shoulders. Stokes is the only scrapper and he has to scrap for all of them: it must be frustrating and exhausting. I would want to turn myself inside out on the beers after a Test.”

The burden of captaining and chaperoning these mostly naïve and sheltered group of players – evident in his weary demeanour and at times disengaged behaviour during Lord’s 150^th Test, declining, for instance, to line up with the other ex-England captains for a commemorative photo at lunch on the first day – eventually caused his deep reservoirs of resilience to rupture. A self-destructive streak that he mostly suppresses, re-surfaced.

It was a watershed. He has had a difficult few months, after the intense disappointment of the Ashes which he (and we) hoped would define his captaincy, a nasty facial injury and a realisation that his batting is in decline. Cricket is not fun anymore. It’s a chore. It looks as if he has had enough. “He’s done mate,” wrote a recent Australian captain to me this week. And no one, in all honesty, could blame him.

A lectern is currently being assembled for positioning outside the Trent Bridge pavilion tomorrow from where Brendon McCullum is expected to deliver his resignation speech.

I’m kidding of course. McCullum is due to address the media tomorrow but not from a lectern and he won’t be resigning. Not yet anyway. He must be giving it some serious thought, though. Why would anyone want to coach within this shambles of an organisation who have little control of where their players are, what they are doing or when they are next available. An organsiation that can’t seem to effectively communicate even the most basic information to its employees, many of whom are naive to a fault.

Notable ex-players have declared that you don’t (or shouldn’t) need a curfew to keep players – “who are adults” in line. I totally disagree. You absolutely do need one. Most of these players are ‘adults’ only in terms of their biological age, but not in terms of their attitude to life. Because of their talent they have been cossetted and fawned on, had smoke blown up their backsides and their arses wiped from an early age.

I know, I was one (a professional cricketer) for 15 years and I probably behaved as badly as some of the England lads have. The only difference was I wasn’t representing my country – not that that gave me license to stay out until 4am at a rugby club ball, leave late for a Sunday league match a few hours later and arrive after the toss with my captain’s kit in my car. Sad, but true.

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Take a look at this clip above of the documentary The Greatest Game which I wrote and helped produce, chronicling England’s 2019 World Cup triumph. We spent two days filming with Ben Stokes and he was very open about his feelings in the lead up to and during that tournament. This segment is very revealing. It focuses on the crunch match during the World Cup when England, the overwhelming favourites, after losses to Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Australia, had to defeat (unbeaten) India just to stay in the competition. It was, as the psychologists like to say, a fight or flight moment.

England employed a sports psychologist, David Young, to work with them during the competition. At this critical juncture he instigated a team meeting and implored each player to speak their mind. First up was Stokes. He was brutally honest. “I said ‘I’m nervous’” Stokes admitted. “I said ‘if we lose this game we are out of the World Cup. I know that and I don’t want that to happen.’ Sometimes you feel like you’re the only one who thinks like that. Everyone’s going to be thinking like that. Embrace it. Don’t let it swallow you up.”

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