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London: Andrew Strauss made it clear that cricketing philosophy rather than nationality would determine his selection of England’s new coach. In the Australian Trevor Bayliss, Strauss has found someone who shares his values. He has also seen in Bayliss the image of Duncan Fletcher, the England coach who played a huge role in Strauss’s development as a young Test cricketer.
Bayliss is 52 — Fletcher was 51 when he was appointed England coach in 1999 — and has described his approach to coaching as to create a laid-back environment, taking the heat off players to enable them to perform in high-intensity situations.
Australians who know him describe a man from the old school who loves talking cricket over a beer and believes players are at their best when they are allowed to think for themselves. It is the approach Strauss wanted and persuaded him to choose an Australian to coach England for the first time and with an Ashes series looming.
“He gets the best out of his team. He is harsh but fair,” Shane Warne said. “He plays the game in the right spirit. He likes to play an exciting brand of cricket, got Sri Lanka to a World Cup final. He has done well and it is good for England to get someone from outside England who can offer a different viewpoint.”
His methods work. Bayliss has won almost every trophy going. He has twice led New South Wales to the Sheffield Shield, in 2004 and 2014, and the ING Cup, Australia’s 50-over competition, is a double Indian Premier League winner with the Kolkata Knight Riders, led Sydney Sixers to the 2012 Big Bash title and coached Sri Lanka for four years culminating in a World Cup final in 2011. He also steered Australia to a Twenty20 series win against South Africa last year as a locum coach while Darren Lehmann was taking a break.
No other coach on the England shortlist could compete with such a track record in delivering success in one-day cricket, and that was the final clincher for Strauss to pick Bayliss over Jason Gillespie.
The move reunites Bayliss with Paul Farbrace, the England assistant coach who emerged as an influential figure in the process. Farbrace was Bayliss’s assistant coach in the Sri Lanka set-up and the pair were caught up in the terrorist attack on the team’s bus in Lahore in 2009.
It is a coup for Strauss to lure away a highly rated coach from under the noses of Cricket Australia and corrects a mistake by Paul Downton 18 months ago. Downton spoke to Bayliss via video call but put his faith in Moores, realising the prevailing mood at the ECB was to appoint an Englishman to replace Andy Flower.
Now Bayliss has just six weeks to prepare for his first Test assignment, the Ashes series that begins in Cardiff on July 10.
As would have been the case under Downton, Bayliss will be forbidden from recalling Kevin Pietersen, a situation he described as “disappointing” when reflecting on his last meeting with the ECB.
“All that was said was that he wouldn’t be playing, “ he told Cricinfo last year. “I didn’t press it any further.
“To have such a player in the team would be an advantage, but you’ve got to go back and see how they actually got there and could that have been handled better? I don’t know as I wasn’t closely involved. It’s disappointing that such a good player is no longer playing.”
Bayliss will have to form a working partnership with Alastair Cook quickly, although it is likely to be a short one, with the captain expected to step down at the end of this Ashes series, regardless of the result. That would allow Bayliss to develop a relationship with Cook’s successor-elect, Joe Root.
He will find that Bayliss is a coach who puts the captain at the forefront of decision-making and will always defer to his authority, exactly the approach Fletcher took with Nasser Hussain and Michael Vaughan.
As a player Bayliss was a doughty, courageous opener in a strong NSW team playing alongside the Waugh twins. Steve Waugh was so impressed by his methods he invited him to coach for a short stint at Kent while he was their overseas player in 2003. Bayliss did not play international cricket but that was not an essential factor for Strauss.
— The Daily Telegraph