England have crashed out of a second ICC white ball tournament in just eight months. Whilst reaching the semi finals in this T20 World Cup looks a lot better than finishing seventh in last year’s ODI World Cup, the performance levels were around the same. England won just one out of four matches against full ICC members in this competition, and two from eight in last year’s.
It is customary after such results for heads to roll. Let’s go through the candidates:
Matthew Mott
It’s tough to see how he survives this. Since he took over, the England men’s white ball teams have a losing record overall against ICC full member teams; 12-18 in ODIs and 20-19 in T20Is. Victories against the Netherlands, Oman, Namibia and the USA help burnish his record, but England have not been very good for a while now.
At the same time, he is the least-connected person in this list to the people who could protect him. Being an Australian who spent seven years coaching women’s cricket before being hired means that he probably doesn’t have too many friends either in the English cricket media or the ECB itself. English cricket often resembles a private gentlemen’s club (which makes sense when you remember that one is the ECB’s landlord), and Mott is not a member. Director of Cricket Rob Key has specifically refused to guarantee Mott would still be England’s coach in their next white ball series, which is second only to receiving Key’s ‘full support’ in terms of suggesting Mott is as good as gone.
Jos Buttler
Buttler is most visible person in the England white ball setup, and also ultimately responsible for any decisions made on the field. He was England’s top runscorer in this competition, so there is no questioning his selection in the team, but his captaincy might well be in the balance.
The problem with making a change here would be that there are no obvious candidates in the team to replace him. The current players most likely to compete in the 2025 Champions Trophy and 2026 T20 World Cup besides Buttler are Phil Salt, Harry Brook, Reece Topley and Adil Rashid. None of them scream ‘leadership material’. Neither are there necessarily any players outside of the current squad who would justify selection for the England team based on their batting or bowling whilst having a lot of experience as captain.
Buttler’s best defence is that there are no alternatives, which doesn’t say much for English cricket.
Luke Wright
A lot has been made of England’s aging squads, with several players seeming past their prime. If the issue is selection, then it makes sense to look at England men’s head selector. The problem with that for someone like myself, someone “Outside Cricket”, is that Wright has had virtually no interviews since he took the job in 2022. Unlike some of his predecessors, who would happily tell the media every thought which went through their head (or which they stole from others), I genuinely have no idea what Wright does in his role. A Daily Mail article (so take with a pinch of salt) from 2022 even suggests that Wright’s main function is to discuss scouting data with the coaches and captains rather than necessarily selecting the squads and teams himself.
Freddie Wilde
Wilde is the lead data analyst for the England men’s white ball teams. Data analysis is an ever-increasing part of how cricket teams operate, both in terms of selection and in-game tactics. Senior people within the ECB appear to place great weight on the importance of data, particularly with regards to ball tracking, and so Wilde’s work can have a significant impact on the team.
I am highly sceptical of the way ‘data’ is used in cricket, and despair at the way in which it is presented as incontrovertible science rather than a highly subjective and limited tool. There is very little overlap between people who run cricket teams (or broadcasters) and people with a strong maths background, and so claims from people with a laptop claiming that they have a programme which has ‘solved cricket’ are not questioned as much as they should be.
If Matthew Mott is the least well-connected person on this list, then Wilde has a claim to being the most. The son of a cricket correspondent, he has held a wide array of jobs across the English cricket media before spending a few years at CricViz and then the ECB. It is highly unlikely that any criticism of him or his role would be picked up in the English press. Several analysts and journalists have already defended Freddie Wilde tangentially, saying that tactical ‘mistakes’ from England (Not picking enough spinners or left-handed batters) proves that the data must have been ignored and replaced by the neolithic gut instincts of the England coaches and captain.
This would be very out of character within the ECB. Ball tracking has been rolled out across county cricket specifically to gather more data to aid with selection, leading to players like Shoaib Bashir being selected not on the basis of bowling average or economy but more esoteric measures such as release height. The England women’s teams are using ‘AI’ simulations to pick their teams. English cricket as a whole seems all-in on doing what a computer tells them, and so it seems unlikely that they would be consistently going against their lead analyst’s guidance.
Ed Barney
Ed Barney is the England Men’s Performance Director, essentially responsible for preparing current and future England players at the Loughborough training facility.
I am not a fan of the ECB’s facility at Loughborough or their approach in previous years. There is a long list of promising bowlers who were sent there for remedial training to make them quicker or less prone to injury who came out in a lot worse condition than they went in. That said, I’m going to give Barney a pass on this one seeing as he was only hired in March. His predecessor, Mo Bobat, has taken a job at Derby County (the football club) to work in a ‘sports intelligence’ unit alongside former England cricketer/selector Ed Smith.
Rob Key
The big cheese. The head honcho. The person who hired or appointed every other person in this post.
Key did a half-hour interview on Sky Sports after England crashed out of the ODI WOrld Cup last year in which he said:
“The white ball sides, actually, just needed to keep on going. Just evolve. Just keep on moving forward. And the reason we’ve done that, I don’t think is Matthew Mott and Jos Buttler’s fault. […] We’ve had some honest conversations about how we can all improve but I have myself accountable more than them. Every single time that we’ve had discussions about the team, whether it’s been Test team or fifty-over team or T20 team, I’ve always said to them (and they haven’t complained once) “I’m sorry, you’re not getting your best team here, now”. When it goes right the way back to after the World T20, when we played the fifty-over series against Australia. “Like, sorry. All your best players are going to the Test team in Pakistan”. The same when the Test team were in New Zealand and we were in Bangladesh. The last series, really, in these conditions. I was the one who said “You’re not having your best team here. I’m very sorry, you’re going to have to make do”, to the point where people returning down that tour (You had people like David Willey, James Vince) all these not wanting to go on that trip.
So actually, it’s very hard for me now, the first time it all goes wrong to turn around and say “By the way, that’s all your fault”. You know, I’m accountable for that as much as they are. Sorry, more than they are.
And their job is to work out how they can then get this thing back on track and start moving it forward. I’m watching India play and miss in their own conditions, as you know it’s been a benefit to be the country playing the World Cup in their country, but India… You look on paper, they look a better side than us at the moment. So we’ve got to get past them again. So the next time round, the Champions Trophy then into the next World Cup, we’re the ones that everyone’s trying to catch up. And I believe they can.”
If someone says that they are more accountable than the people everyone expects to get fired, should they not also be fired? Of course, executives and directors will often talk about personal responsibility in public whilst firing all of their underlings in private. We know how this game is played.
It bears saying that the excerpt above seemingly makes clear that Key would override the coaches and captains regarding selection, at the very least in terms of balancing the needs of red and white ball priorities. If you consider poor selection as an issue for the white ball teams, particularly the reliance on underperforming veterans rather than trusting the younger players coming through, then who outside those selection meetings could say who supported or opposed those picks? If Key is the most powerful person in that room, the final arbiter, then it would seem unfair to blame Mott or Wright for selecting cricketers who seem past their best.
Key’s image in the media is still that of a genius. He’s obviously a good communicator, honed through his years as a commentator, and he is widely credited for bringing Bazball cricket to the Test team. On the other hand, the England men’s teams have a losing record in all three formats over the last eighteen months and have just crashed out of two successive World Cups where they lost against 75% of the full ICC members they faced. If he wasn’t as popular as he is across the English cricket establishment, both within the ECB and the English cricket press, he would probably already be gone.
This level of protection from English journalists is rare, and not without limit. If England lose in Australia this winter, typically the graveyard of English coaches and directors of cricket, it seems unlikely he will survive.
No One
Apart from anything else, firing Matthew Mott and hiring a new coach will cost a lot of money. Money which the ECB doesn’t really want to spend. He is halfway through a four-year contract. There may well be a sentiment within the ECB that it is worth letting everyone involved see their contracts through regardless of results on the field. English cricket is increasingly run as a business which prioritises money rather than either a sports team or a governing body, so this wouldn’t necessarily be a surprise.
There is also the typical executive avoidance of admitting a mistake. If Rob Key was the person who hired everyone in this post, it was Richards Gould and Thompson who hired Key and signed off on everyone else. If these people collectively failed in their jobs, it could be argued that that it is those at the very top who are truly culpable. In many ways, it seems better for everyone if they just ignore the results and keep everyone in place for another two years.
After all, it’s only T20. No one really cares about that in England anyway.
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