With news coming this week that the final round of interviews is being held for the England head selectors’ job, it leaves a rather big question to be asked. Why has it taken so long for England to get to this point?
Luke Wright, the last man to hold this role, stepped away from his position in January for personal reasons. If you ask me, he jumped before he was pushed after the disastrous Ashes campaign that England ended up losing 4-1 in rather farcical fashion, with nearly all of their front-line pace bowlers getting injured throughout the series, and a frontline spinner that never bowled a ball in any of the test matches already looking like questionable selections.
The Fact that Mark Wood was even selected for the tour baffled me; he had just recovered from an injury that had kept him out of almost the entire English summer and had effectively played no cricket before the first test match in Perth. It was also a gamble to select Archer, too. I think the whole country knew that he was going to break down at some point on the tour; maybe we just hoped it would be at the end of the tour and not in the middle of the series.
My own grumblings aside, we’ll move on. It has taken the ECB until nearly the second week of May to be any closer to appointing his replacement. Five rounds of championship cricket have been played in the English summer so far; that is five weeks the national selector could have been doing the rounds, watching players and getting a feel for how they are doing. It is also five weeks they could have spent speaking to the county coaches and getting feedback from them about the county game. I understand there has been an application process and then the candidates have had to be whittled down, but I believe all of this could have been done before the county season began to give the new selector the best chance to get his head around things.
We then have to ask: why wasn’t this process started earlier? England did have a white-ball series in Sri Lanka before the T20 World Cup began in India shortly after the Ashes concluded. This shouldn’t have had a bearing on appointing a new selector, in my opinion. It seems to be me that the ECB have just buried its head in the sand on this matter. Why they conducted such a long review into the poor ashes showing, which resulted in nobody losing their jobs and some pinkie promises being made by the management. It should have taken around 10 minutes if you ask me, rather than the months it seemed to inevitably seemed to grind on for. This time would have been better spent looking at applicants, rather than conducting a review we all knew the outcome of anyway.
So then they’ve wasted many months and much valuable time, but we nearly have a new selector. Though who that will be is anybody’s guess. Will they really get any power within the England setup? I really doubt it, you have to play by the managements rules if you want to be in there club it seems, nod and smile when McCullum wants to pluck somebody out of county cricket, because he’s seen a tiktok of them bowling that went viral because he beat the outside edge of a former England captain’s bat rather than the experienced county pro who’s been wheeling away for years and has an outstanding record.
Nod and smile when they want to pick batters based on how quickly they score rather than how many runs they actually get over the course of a test match, and god forbid if they block a few maidens out and the test match is in danger of going into a final day when they could be off playing golf somewhere.
It won’t be long now, hopefully, until we know who this mystery person is going to be, but all I can say to them is “good luck” because they’re going to need it when they step into the circus that is English cricket at the moment.
