Modern day corporations are increasingly realising the benefits of having more diversity in their organisational make-up and empowering individuals to be more flexible and focus on what they do best. Those in charge of managing cricket teams though appear to have a diametrically opposite viewpoint. The Pietersen saga is just the most recent example of this high-handed, headmasterly behaviour from team management and boards. Enough has been written about it (with George Dobell's views the closest to my own) so I won't dwell on the reasons why I think its not the right decision for Engish cricket. The larger (and more worrying) point in my view is that this adds to the list of incidents in recent times of teams pushing for a much more conformist and less individual attitude.
Press conferences were one of the first (and arguably minor/harmless) things to be infected and nowadays all you hear is "hitting the right areas", "putting together partnerships", "following the process" etc and hardly anything that is unique or provocative. But slowly (especially as support staff has grown in size), the disease is spreading to every part of the game. Players are now "expected to make good decisions around preparation", and not handing in homework assignments leads to a "line in the sand moment" and gets you suspended. And its not just in international cricket (ie where the stakes are the highest) as the recent Kirk Edwards suspension shows. Its as if cricketers are students in a school who need the strictest monitoring and not professional athletes (and more importantly full grown adults) who can be trusted to be individually responsible for what they do.
The other cause for alarm is how coaching/management roles across almost all teams have only grown in importance (and power, pay, and influence) in the last decade and cricket seems to be headed the way of football where the coach (or Team Director if you're the ECB) is all-powerful, largely at the expense of the captain. For a sport that's so intensely skill driven and where on-field strategising is key, that definitely feels like an imbalance. Especially given that this change does not always seem to be accompanied by an equal shift in accountability. The West Indies have lurched from disaster to disaster (mostly) and Darren Sammy gets a ton of flak and has even lost the captaincy of the ODI team but Ottis Gibson's failure doesn't seem to warrant even a tenth of the media coverage. India have now lost 10 of their last 14 overseas Tests since Duncan Fletcher took over but its Dhoni and not Fletcher who faces the constant barrage of mainstream and social media invective.
Back to Pietersen and England though. Its ironic that Cook, who made such an effort to bring Pietersen back into the fold after his previous disciplinary axing now appears to have been the one who's driven the final nail in KP's England career coffin. Cook might be a dour batsman and a defensive captain but he's no fool and will realise that the loss of Pietersen on top of Swann (and potentially Jonathan Trott) will mean a gaping hole in England's experience. However, if he's to be in charge of team rebuilding he needs to have a say and its good to at least see him being given that power. The bigger loss in the longer term will be for fans of the game though who will now have to be content with seeing one of the most mercurial talents of the last decade play in T20 leagues. More on that (and on KP) in a separate post.
Press conferences were one of the first (and arguably minor/harmless) things to be infected and nowadays all you hear is "hitting the right areas", "putting together partnerships", "following the process" etc and hardly anything that is unique or provocative. But slowly (especially as support staff has grown in size), the disease is spreading to every part of the game. Players are now "expected to make good decisions around preparation", and not handing in homework assignments leads to a "line in the sand moment" and gets you suspended. And its not just in international cricket (ie where the stakes are the highest) as the recent Kirk Edwards suspension shows. Its as if cricketers are students in a school who need the strictest monitoring and not professional athletes (and more importantly full grown adults) who can be trusted to be individually responsible for what they do.
The other cause for alarm is how coaching/management roles across almost all teams have only grown in importance (and power, pay, and influence) in the last decade and cricket seems to be headed the way of football where the coach (or Team Director if you're the ECB) is all-powerful, largely at the expense of the captain. For a sport that's so intensely skill driven and where on-field strategising is key, that definitely feels like an imbalance. Especially given that this change does not always seem to be accompanied by an equal shift in accountability. The West Indies have lurched from disaster to disaster (mostly) and Darren Sammy gets a ton of flak and has even lost the captaincy of the ODI team but Ottis Gibson's failure doesn't seem to warrant even a tenth of the media coverage. India have now lost 10 of their last 14 overseas Tests since Duncan Fletcher took over but its Dhoni and not Fletcher who faces the constant barrage of mainstream and social media invective.
Back to Pietersen and England though. Its ironic that Cook, who made such an effort to bring Pietersen back into the fold after his previous disciplinary axing now appears to have been the one who's driven the final nail in KP's England career coffin. Cook might be a dour batsman and a defensive captain but he's no fool and will realise that the loss of Pietersen on top of Swann (and potentially Jonathan Trott) will mean a gaping hole in England's experience. However, if he's to be in charge of team rebuilding he needs to have a say and its good to at least see him being given that power. The bigger loss in the longer term will be for fans of the game though who will now have to be content with seeing one of the most mercurial talents of the last decade play in T20 leagues. More on that (and on KP) in a separate post.
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