This game has meaning, for history shows the ‘dead’ rubber in a series can have lasting significance – not least on the captaincyThe Ashes may be gone but the notion of a dead rubber seldom applies when England meet Australia. A Test match between these two nations has a life of its own. There is now the added incentive of points in the Test Championship (no irony intended here, let’s give it a go) and a drawn series would be a welcome rarity in Ashes cricket.Moreover the supposedly “dead” game can often have lasting significance – there are several precedents for that. In 1987 England arrived in Sydney for the final Test 2-0 up, which was a bit of a...
After winning three successive Tests England’s coach has not been widely heralded but Trevor Bayliss has shown that he is more astute than he lets onIt was not so long ago – after the first Lord’s Test of the summer, when Pakistan defeated England by nine wickets – that several sages were quick to start suggesting immediate replacements for Trevor Bayliss as the coach of England’s Test team.They felt able to conclude Bayliss was somehow a fine one-day coach but useless in the Test arena. This was the cutest of arguments somehow differentiating the qualities Bayliss can offer by the colour of the ball in play. It was mostly convenient, headline-making nonsense triggered by England’s poor run in Test cricket....
The ECB could do much worse than rotate the head coach out of Test cricket and appoint someone such as Nasser Hussain or Alec Stewart to promote the red-ball gameThe real problem, in the end, was how little it seemed to be a problem. As England’s cricketers prodded their way to a strangely immobile 58 all out in Auckland, the Test team’s lowest ever first innings score on a covered pitch, the TV cameras kept flitting around in search of some defining note of crisis, settling with a sense of declining interest on the mild, untroubled face of Trevor Bayliss.There it was again, the Bayliss face, looming beneath that leathery white hat. And still conveying through this historically dark moment...
Smaller ECB panel puts greater onus on the head coach Trevor Bayliss to have a significant input into England’s fortunes in all versions of the gameTraditionally after an emphatic Ashes defeat the captain or the coach is jettisoned. But this time the response from the England and Wales Cricket Board has been more measured and decorous than usual. Two months after the defeat in Sydney Andrew Strauss has announced a modest shake-up of England’s selection process.There are obvious reasons why Joe Root and Trevor Bayliss have survived a 4-0 defeat in Australia. Root is a young captain, still coming to the terms with the job. He could be an excellent leader provided he remembers that his prime function is to...
The England coach wants to keep international cricketers fresh but the decision-makers are more concerned with maximising income than careers – Twenty20 Internationals are here to stayFrom somewhere deep in New Zealand on England’s never-ending tour Trevor Bayliss has been musing about T20 cricket. Taken out of context his comments may seem to lack coherence. On one day he advocated that T20 internationals should be abolished except for a little window before and during the World T20 tournament, the next of which is scheduled for Australia in 2020. He said T20 cricket should be the territory of the various franchises around the globe.A couple of days later Bayliss has suggested England might have a specialist T20 coach – he tosses...