England regimes have a habit of ending in the Caribbean. Joe Root resigned soon after defeat in Grenada, Duncan Fletcher left following World Cup exit in 2007 and Peter Moores was quickly out of a job after a Test loss in Antigua.
For Jos Buttler and Matthew Mott the Providence Stadium on the east bank of the Demerara River should be a last stop on a partnership that lacked spark when it mattered.
Mott and Buttler won their first global tournament together – the 2022 Twenty20 in Australia – to unite the white-ball crowns but that now increasingly looks like a success for the last twitches of the Eoin Morgan regime.
Now after one very poor and one indifferent World Cup the need for change is apparent. There are no easy fixes, but with two years to the next World Twenty20 and three to the 50-over version, there is time to rebuild.
Buttler’s captaincy has been a disappointment. He made tactical errors in India last October and more in the Caribbean. On the field he gauged conditions slower than opponents, appeared too locked into data analysis to make free-thinking decisions and his own form suffered.
He does not appear to enjoy leadership, especially the scrutiny it brings, and whereas it was clear what Morgan stood for, and Ben Stokes with the Test team, it is very difficult to pin down the identity of Buttler’s side.
Mott is liked by the players who believe he is a good coach and with a captain like Morgan or Stokes it probably could have worked but with Buttler it is a combination that lacks the uncompromising clarity that ran through Morgan’s era and Stokes’s Bazballers.
He struggles to articulate in public the team’s philosophy and England had to draft in outsiders to prop him up such as sports psychologist David Young to improve communication, assistant coach Kieron Pollard to plug gaps in his knowledge of the top of the men’s game and Andrew Flintoff to bring some weight of playing success to the backroom staff.
England limped through to the semi-finals beating mainly minnows and as soon as they played decent opposition their flaws were exposed. In 12 games against Test playing nations across both World Cups England won three, beating West Indies, Bangladesh and a Pakistan team in India that had already been knocked out of the tournament.
Against the teams England compare themselves to they were found badly wanting, losing at both tournaments to South Africa, Australia and India. They were too wedded to fading stars, reluctant to pull the trigger on players past their best and instead found it easier to drop youth instead. In India it was Harry Brook who was left out to protect those with big reputations. In the Caribbean, Will Jacks was axed. It all felt very stale.
Mott signed a four-year contract and presumably will have to be paid off if Rob Key, the director of men’s cricket, sacks him. A full recruitment drive would then follow but there is one obvious successor and that is Morgan, a naturally strong leader.
We know he has the ruthlessness to call time on careers of old team-mates such as Jonny Bairstow, Moeen Ali and Chris Jordan. He did it to Liam Plunkett after the 2019 World Cup and isolated Alex Hales. He would give strong leadership, take the pressure off the captain with media duties and command instant respect from players.
Whether he wants to give up his lucrative commentary life and go on the road now he has a young family will be an issue but the split coaching role is here to stay because schedules are so crowded which means there is plenty of downtime for the white-ball coach.
Then there is Flintoff. He acted as chief tyre pumper in the Caribbean, lifting the players and making them feel like a million dollars. Mark Wood said he was “fantastic” with a “natural aura”. He has no head coach experience but the same can be said of Morgan.
Flintoff will coach the Northern Superchargers in the Hundred and Key told Telegraph Sport earlier this year England would be “stupid” not to consider him when a head coach’s role became available.
Flintoff may well have other offers with a television career to relaunch after his accident and he may find the day-to-day grind of coaching not to his liking, which is why his Hundred gig will be a barometer. Then there is his relationship with Richard Thompson, the chairman of the ECB. Thompson founded and was chair of M&C Saatchi & Merlin, the agency that represents Flintoff, for 21 years. He moved to a non-exec role when he became chair of M&C Saatchi Group UK in 2020. He is non-exec chair of the production company that makes Flintoff’s BBC documentary, Field of Dreams. Cricket is a small world, but those close ties could leave Thompson open to accusations of a conflict of interest in the event of Flintoff becoming a head coach.
Finding a new captain will be harder and Buttler may survive for lack of alternatives. Every decision has drawbacks. Keeping Buttler is the easy call because there is nobody else and player power is strong in English cricket. It is less disruptive to remove an Australian head coach with no profile in England than sack one of the best white-ball players of all time but keeping a captain in the job for lack of alternatives rarely works.
With such a long run to the next the next World Cups, relatively speaking for the modern game, and a coach like Morgan in situ who has bags of captaincy experience at the top himself, it would be possible to take a gamble on a young captain and do some succession planning for the Test team in the process. The next global tournament is the Champions Trophy in Pakistan in February, a lower profile competition that offers a good starting point.
Brook has a smart cricket brain, topped the averages at this World Cup and was crying out for a bigger role in the team. With a strong coach next to him, Brook would be a bold and daring choice that would signal a new era. The other is to look outside this playing group to Zak Crawley, who captained the white-ball team at the end of last year against Ireland. But he is not a first choice and cementing his place in the top order while taking on captaincy duties would be tough.
Sam Curran has leadership experience in the IPL but struggles to play regularly. Ollie Pope is Test vice-captain but is another out of the white-ball teams.
Brook would need a lot of help but there is no shortage of money to provide coaching support or captaincy mentoring. The clash of schedules is tricky with the Test and white-ball sides occasionally on opposite sides of the world at the same time but Brook is young enough to handle the workload. There is a catch with every choice but doing nothing risks another World Cup passing England by.
Mott: I want to make England ‘bigger, badder and better’
Matthew Mott wants to stay on as England’s one-day head coach and has vowed his team will bounce back from their latest World Cup campaign by being “bigger, badder and better”.
Mott’s future will be on hold for a few weeks while England’s attention shifts to the Test series against West Indies but director of cricket Rob Key will conduct a full review and it seems unlikely the coach will survive.
If he does then it will be a huge show of faith after two disappointing World Cup campaigns culminated in a semi-final hammering by India that once again thrust Mott’s future in the spotlight as well as that of captain Jos Buttler.
“Yeah, I definitely do,” said Mott when asked if he is the right coach to lead England. “I think Jos and I as a partnership has been galvanised in the last six months and I think you learn more about leadership in times of adversity. I think if you asked around the dressing room, we’ve got a lot of people in the support staff that have given credit to the leadership group for the way we’ve stuck together in tricky circumstances.
“We’ll lick our wounds in the next week or two and then I’m sure we’ll get back to planning. We’ve got a series against Australia in September that presents a great opportunity to see what it looks like. But there’s been no discussions about that. We’ll take that time to reflect when we get back and then hopefully come back bigger, badder and better.”
England’s topsy-turvy World Cup saw them close to going out in the first round when they lost to Australia and were washed out against Scotland. A better Super Eights included a good win over West Indies but losses to South Africa and India proved how far the team has fallen. They reached the last four based on three wins over minnows. Tactics and selection mistakes dogged the campaign.
“Look, I think we were good without being great,” was Mott’s view on this World Cup. “I think if we’re being honest we weren’t quite at our best, we were hoping to peak at the right time. And certainly coming up against India we needed to peak and we knew that. I think this was possibly going to be the toughest test we had and we weren’t quite good enough. I think as a tournament as a whole given some of the adversity we faced I was absolutely pumped with Jos’s leadership throughout, I thought he was amazing just to stay so level. The whole group really. I think there were times in the tournament where we did it really tough but we presented an opportunity to get into a semi-final and India are undefeated and a very good team.”
India will play South Africa in Saturday’s final although a weather warning has been issued in Barbados over the weekend warning of a tropical storm. There is a reserve day for the final. In the event of no play across both days the title will be shared.
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