2

Shiny Shoes and a Perma-tan

NASSER HUSSAIN AND Duncan Fletcher could not have transformed England cricket without central contracts. Fact. No one single decision by the ECB in recent times has been more important for the improvement of the England cricket team. Together and individually Hussain and Fletcher were pretty good anyway, but their timing was impeccable. They arrived just as this radical new initiative was about to be introduced, and they benefited accordingly. But, as always, with the gain goes the pain, and Fletcher in particular had an extra ordinarily tough task in overseeing the new contracts’ implementation.

Make no mistake; central contracts were a radical initiative. They were radical because since county cricket had begun in the nineteenth century, the counties had always been the players’ primary employers. Some of the better players sometimes went off to play for England – for which they received some additional monetary reward – but they always returned swiftly, and went straight back into county action. They went back to their day job.

Now it was being proposed that the ECB take control of those players, maybe even deciding that they miss the odd county game so that they could be in some sort of decent physical condition for the next international. The revolutionary notion was being floated that maybe an England player could win a Test match and celebrate with his colleagues that evening rather than rush off to join his county brethren in readiness for a match the following morning. Maybe he could even report for duty for a Test match a little before noon on the day before the match. Maybe he could even report for duty feeling a little less than knackered. Goodness, maybe he could even feel part of the England team rather than some temporary intruder, as many did, including me when I played twice in 1998.

Please forgive my sarcasm. These notions seem so sensible and routine nowadays, but, believe it or not, there was a time when they were not even considered. ‘We weren’t really a team,’ wrote Graham Thorpe of those times. ‘They [Tests for England] were more like representative matches.’

Somebody had needed to see the bigger picture. And England captain Mike Atherton had. In his report after the winter tour of South Africa and then the Asian World Cup of 1995/96, he wrote: ‘Although we suffered fewer injuries than on the previous tour, we do suffer more than other teams (we were the only team to send two players home from the World Cup). Clearly this is no mere accident; it is a result of overplaying. Considering especially the need to look after our premier players (in particular the fast bowlers), it seems to me the sooner we can ensure these players are under TCCB [the Test and County Cricket Board, which was incorporated into the ECB in 1997] contracts all year round the better.’ But it still went down like the proverbial lead balloon.

Central contracts were considered in the Acfield Review (set up under David Acfield, then Essex’s chairman of cricket, to look at the management of the England team) that was published in July 1996, but, even though there were two former England captains in David Gower and Mike Gatting on that committee, there was no recommendation for contracts, only that the chairman of selectors should have the right to withdraw players from county cricket if he felt it best for their long-term welfare. Even that idea was summarily rejected by the counties in August. And to think that Kerry Packer had lit the way for international cricketers some nineteen years previously, when using three-year contracts to entice the world’s best players for his World Series Cricket. Talk about slow on the uptake.

Somehow English cricket had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the modern world, and to Lord MacLaurin, who became chairman of the ECB upon its creation in 1997, befell that fiendishly difficult task. ‘Never trust a man with shiny shoes and a perma-tan’ are the oft-repeated words concerning MacLaurin, as penned by Atherton in his autobiography. But, wonderful wordsmith that he has become, they were not Atherton’s own, as indeed he admits if you read closely. They were prefaced by ‘Someone once told me …’, and that someone was Derek Pringle, the current cricket correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.

But they were still delightfully apposite. MacLaurin did have, indeed still has, both. He was, and still can be, smooth and political. But for the ECB at the time he was the perfect figure. He modernized English cricket. He made eighteen stubborn and anachronistic counties realize that the England team was much more important than them as a collective.

‘I visited all the county chairmen when I took over,’ MacLaurin says on a bright, sunny day when we meet near his home at Farleigh Hungerford outside Bath, ‘and frankly none of them was interested in a winning England side. They were only interested in their own counties winning the championship.’ Why is that not a surprise? It is still a view not exactly unknown today.

I’ll tell you a little story to illustrate the point. Remember the 2005 Ashes and all its glory for England? Well, England might not have won that series had one county had its myopic way. Before the decisive fifth Test at the Oval, with England leading the series 2–1 and Australia desperate to win in order to share the series and so keep the urn that they held, Australia wanted to give their second leg-spinner, Stuart MacGill, some match practice. They were considering playing him at the Oval, but he hadn’t played in any of the previous Tests.

Somerset stepped forward, eagerly offering MacGill a game (he had played one match for them against Pakistan A in 1997). Even if Auckland did give James Anderson some such match practice on England’s tour of New Zealand in 2008, can you imagine an England reserve spinner being given a game or two in the Sheffield Shield while on an Ashes tour? The answer is no. A definitive no. But here were Somerset thinking only of themselves. MacGill was actually on his way to Taunton when the deal fell through, with it becoming clear that he was available for only one week, when the ECB regulations at the time specified a minimum of three weeks for overseas signings. You do wonder what might have happened if MacGill had played in the dramatically drawn Oval Test instead of the wayward seamer Shaun Tait.

At least by 2011 Somerset had changed their outlook considerably, allowing the short-of-match-practice England captain Andrew Strauss to appear as a guest against India before the first Test against the same opponents.

The Somerset chairman in 2005? Giles Clarke. The same Giles Clarke who was to become ECB chairman in 2007, and the same Giles Clarke who phoned both Middlesex and Kent in outrage when they signed the Australians Phillip Hughes and Stuart Clark to play ahead of the 2009 Ashes in this country. Hughes scored a bucketful of runs for Middlesex, but was then exposed in the Tests, and dropped. Clark did not arrive because he was called up to Australia’s one-day squad in South Africa.

Back to the ECB’s first chairman, and MacLaurin knew that his ‘shop window’ needed his full attention. Otherwise the ‘shambles’ of an operation, as he describes the ECB then, with its budget of ‘just £30 million’, stood no chance.

He chaired the last meeting of the TCCB in December 1996, then thought it best to check on the well-being of the England team, who were touring Zimbabwe at the time. It did not take him long to discover it was a sick patient. He telephoned Lord’s in order to organize his accommodation on the tour and was shocked to be asked where he would like to stay. ‘With the team, of course,’ he answered. He was then told politely that that had never happened before. The management always stayed somewhere else in much more salubrious surroundings, while the team slummed it, always sharing rooms, as well as always flying in economy class.

‘The gap between the players and the administrators was quite frightening,’ MacLaurin says. ‘But my late wife and I booked into the team hotel. I went around all the rooms and couldn’t believe it. I went to Tim Lamb immediately and said, “I’m appalled that we treat our boys like this.” He said, “It’s tradition.” I just said, “That tradition stops now, and they will all have single rooms.” ’ They also began to travel business class as well as enjoying a whole host of what Lamb calls ‘fringe benefits’. And too right too.

In an instant MacLaurin had smashed down an unfathomable but long-lasting class barrier. At last an administrator was more concerned with the players’ welfare than his perks and expenses. ‘I didn’t know these guys from a bar of soap,’ he says, ‘so I thought I’d better get to know them. I spent time with each and every one of them. I started with Mike Atherton. “What is the vision for England cricket?” I asked him. “Tell me what, if you like in business terms, is the mission statement?” He looked at me across the breakfast table and said, “Chairman, you’re the first person to talk to me about that.” And he’d been captain for three years!’

MacLaurin also had to alter England’s image on a tour that became infamous for coach David Lloyd’s ‘We flippin’ murdered ’em’ comment after England had drawn – yes, drawn – with Zimbabwe in the Bulawayo Test. It was an outburst now termed ‘disastrous’ by Lamb. Relations between the two sides were probably best summed up by the home skipper, Alistair Campbell, who accused England of possessing a ‘superiority complex’. And he was right. But it was a stance without foundation. England truly were a poorly performing side then.

They were also scruffy. ‘If you saw the boys on the field,’ says MacLaurin, ‘they went out with jockey caps on. They had white helmets, pink helmets and green helmets. There was no discipline at all. I went about branding the whole thing. That was not popular with a lot of people, but a lot of things I did weren’t popular.’

England may have ceased being called MCC away from home after the 1976/77 tour of Australia, but they were still wearing the club’s colours of yellow and red (or egg and bacon) on their sweaters and caps with the St George and Dragon crest in Zimbabwe and later that winter in New Zealand. MacLaurin knew that had to end, with the three lions and crown always being worn, even if it inevitably upset the MCC. ‘Not only did we need a winning England team but we also needed a common brand in order to attract the right sorts of sponsors,’ he says.

And sponsors were leaving cricket at an alarming rate at the time. Texaco had withdrawn their sponsorship of the one-day internationals, AXA of the Sunday League and Britannic Assurance of the county championship. But, as you would expect, MacLaurin had some rather decent contacts. He was not yet chairman of Vodafone (he became so in the summer of 1998) but he knew its chief executive, Christopher Gent, a keen cricket supporter who was educated at Archbishop Tenison’s Grammar School not a stone’s throw away from the Oval, well enough to broker a deal. So Vodafone’s first tour as England sponsors was to the West Indies in early 1998. It was a relationship that lasted twelve years.

Even more importantly, in that same year MacLaurin persuaded Chris Smith, the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, to move cricket from the government’s broadcasting A list, which restricted the live coverage of sport to terrestrial channels, to the B list. It was only on the proviso that ‘the majority of Test cricket was on terrestrial TV’, as MacLaurin says now.

That has obviously caused much debate and rancour since, because that is anything but the case these days with Sky ruling the roost, but this was only a gentlemen’s agreement. It was hugely significant, though. Suddenly the field was open, and the sole bid was not coming from the BBC, who had first televised Test cricket in 1938 and provided sixty years of excellent coverage. Much to the chagrin of the BBC, a joint deal was done with BSkyB and Channel 4, whose unexpected bid outdid the BBC’s by several million pounds. ‘Our budget suddenly went up from approx £30 million to £130 million,’ says MacLaurin.

The ECB had money to do things, most notably to introduce central contracts. In 2006, when terrestrial television was abandoned completely and the whole rights package sold to BSkyB in a four-year deal worth £208 million, they had even more. For the period 2009 to 2013 the deal is worth £260 million.

Like it or not, sporting excellence requires dosh. And lots of it. As an example there is none better than Clive Woodward’s famous switching of hotels for his England rugby team in South Africa in 1998, paid for on his own Amex card. Only the best will do if the real mountain tops are to be reached, and this was a statement of intent that was still resonating in 2003 when England won the rugby World Cup. So in 2010 Hugh Morris, by then the managing director of England cricket, was spending £24.8 million on all England teams. In 2005 that figure had been only £10.9 million. It makes a difference. It really does.

In October 1998 the First Class Forum had at last agreed in principle to the introduction of central contracts. Unsurprisingly the ECB did what every good English sporting organization does: they formed a committee. Yes, the Contracts Review Group was set up under the chairmanship of Don Trangmar, chairman of Sussex and a director of Marks and Spencer, and included Surrey’s Paul Sheldon and Somerset’s Peter Anderson. Quite naturally, the road they travelled was long and bumpy.

David Morgan was then chairman of the First Class Forum, the body that served as the guardian of county cricket until 2005 and had to provide clearance and permission to implement any significantly different changes in the game. Central contracts certainly came under that umbrella. ‘Having them approved was not an easy task,’ says Morgan with typical understatement. ‘There were many county chairmen and chief executives – mainly those that had played at first-class level – who didn’t believe it was right that Team England should be separate from the eighteen first-class counties. They believed that England had done great things in the past and would continue to do great things in the future without this.’ Ah, the vision of those men.

But by May 1999 the FCF had confirmed their imminent arrival. MacLaurin was to have what he wanted, as mentioned by Morgan above: ‘Team England’. In effect they were becoming the nineteenth county, and by far the most important.

‘It started off whereby players would have parallel contracts with the counties and the ECB,’ says Lamb, ‘but that immediately led to difficulties because there were always going to be conflicts in terms of what the counties wanted from their players. It became clear very quickly that if we were going to get this thing through, we were going to have to cross the counties’ palms with silver and agree to pay the players’ county salaries. That was the tipping point. When that became clear the counties had no option but to say yes.’

This was actually an episode in which Simon Pack played a role rather than the fool, cajoling and eventually persuading the counties that English cricket needed this departure from the norm. There were, after all, going to be seven home Tests a summer from 2000 (up from six) and many more home one-day internationals (in 2000 came the first triangular series of seven matches after many years of just three home ODIs per summer), and counties were hardly going to see their star players anyway. Quite rightly Pack copped a lot of flak for his work at the ECB, but speak to anyone about his work on this issue and they have nothing but the utmost praise. He ensured that the critical mass of the counties was in favour. ‘The General was absolutely fantastic,’ says Brian Bolus with his usual chuckle.

So finally, on Monday, 23 August 1999, the day after the debacle at the Oval with which we began this book, the counties agreed to the introduction of central contracts. The following March twelve England players were awarded ECB contracts for the first time: Nasser Hussain (captain), Michael Atherton, Andrew Caddick, Andrew Flintoff, Darren Gough, Dean Headley, Graeme Hick, Mark Ramprakash, Chris Schofield, Alec Stewart, Michael Vaughan and Craig White.

These were only six-month contracts – twelve-month contracts were not introduced until 2002 – but crucially these players were under the management and control of the England coach, Fletcher. It was a huge step forward.

There were teething problems, of course, not least that many county fans could not and would not comprehend this new arrangement. Gough even received a poison-pen letter when he missed a Yorkshire match. The central contract was a very complicated document then; goodness knows what it is like now with its clauses regarding release to the Indian Premier League. And there was the anomaly that the contracted players were on significantly less than some county players, like Chris Adams at Sussex and Alan Mullally at Hampshire, who were earning six-figure salaries at the time. For some the ECB contract was worth less than the county contract it was replacing. Counties made up the difference in those cases. For Atherton, for example, it was a straight swap. His county contract was worth £60,000; so was his new ECB contract.

An ECB contract is worth considerably more than that these days, with match fees paid on top. There was a time when the figures, including the different bands in which various players fell, were readily available. So in 2004 we know that the contracts were graded in three bands, worth between £100,000 and £150,000, with match fees paid on top. A Test match was worth £5,500 and a one-day international £2,200. For Tests abroad there was a 40% added premium, with 20% for one-day internationals, and for global trophies 50%. So, say, a player appearing in all matches in the 2002/03 season with an Ashes tour and a World Cup would have earned a basic salary in the region of £350,000.

Now the ECB are much more careful about releasing such information, and rightly so. Nonetheless it would be a surprise were the busiest players not earning, just from the ECB, somewhere near £450,000 a year. Indeed in 2011 it would be just as surprising were Test captain Andrew Strauss not earning over £1 million in total for the year: a Band A Central Contract might be worth £400,000, with bonuses for appearances and wins – which are pooled and then divided up – of maybe £150,000, and sponsorship deals with Gray Nicholls, Jaguar, etc. adding up to another £500,000. These are figures no county player can ever hope to earn. And that is how it should be; the best players should earn the biggest salaries. Mind you, there are still too many mediocre county players on or near six-figure salaries. Little wonder that the counties are in so much debt.

There was also the subject of compensation, which was not helped by the spectacularly misguided selection of Lancashire’s leg-spinner, Schofield. The search for a wrist-spinner to rival Australia’s Shane Warne was at its most manic at the time, and Schofield was picked on the recommendation of Gatting, tour manager of the England A trip to New Zealand the previous winter. While he was extolling the virtues of Schofield as ‘the future of English cricket’, as Fletcher noted in his autobiography, Gatting was also professing he was ‘not sure about this [Marcus] Trescothick’. Thank goodness, Fletcher backed his own judgement and ensured Trescothick was on the international stage by the summer of 2000. Gatting has many qualities, but, sadly, in my opinion selecting and coaching are not among them.

So while Schofield was justifiably shunted from the Test scene after two Tests against Zimbabwe, it meant his county received his services for free, while other counties like Derbyshire, who lost the non-contracted Dominic Cork for four Tests, were still paying players and not receiving too much compensation (just £12,000 in Cork’s case in 2000), and were then being asked to rest him at the end of the season. Thankfully that anomaly has been satisfactorily rectified over time.

Not that contention over the issue of rest has been sorted. English cricket simply does not understand the meaning of the word. Place the lads on a treadmill in April (nearly March now, with ludicrously early starts to seasons) and make damn sure they’re not allowed off it until the leaves are disappearing off the trees in autumn. Don’t worry if one-day matches start immediately after four-day matches so that no practice or preparation is possible, so that tired players are playing on often tired pitches. Don’t worry that mental tiredness is just as debilitating as its physical comrade, meaning that just the mere sight of a cricket dressing room is too much by the end.

Fletcher always made a good point in stressing that the English summer should be viewed no differently from a winter tour. England players need rest. The county season is not sacrosanct. And once burnout takes hold it is too late. The skill of the very best coaches is being able to look over the horizon and spot not just the signs long before, but also the most dangerous periods. Fletcher was extraordinarily good at this. And at first he was pleasantly surprised by the reaction from the counties at his foresight. But then came the end of the season, when promotion and relegation were being hotly contested. The mood changed. The self-interest and short-sightedness came flooding back. One county chairman told Fletcher, ‘I agree with what you’re doing but there is no way I could say that in front of my constituency.’

And Graham Gooch is an interesting case. When coach of Essex he was against the resting of England players. Indeed he fell out with Hussain over that very issue. Now that he is Andy Flower’s batting coach he has a very different view. He understands the demands and recognizes the need for rest.

It is rather ironic, given the (Chris) Schofield scenario, that Fletcher probably had most trouble with Lancashire as regards central contracts and the resting of players. It began with their outrage at Atherton missing some National League matches in the 2000 season and continued unabated with James Anderson and others in later years.

Take this quote from Lancashire’s chairman, Jack Simmons, after Fletcher had resigned from the England job in 2007. ‘The introduction of Peter Moores as replacement for Fletcher has already improved relationships with the counties,’ he said. ‘A player improves by being out in the middle and not sat on his backside. If Mr Fletcher is hoping to return to county cricket as a coach, I don’t think he needs to contact Lancashire.’

Ah, good old ‘Flat Jack’, the heftily built off-spinner with a penchant for fish and chips who was still playing first-class cricket at the age of forty-eight. Simmons is actually a lovely fellow, and a loyal servant to his county as both player and administrator, but in the latter role he was as old-fashioned as he was in the former.

Simmons would do well to consider the case of Glen Chapple, a fine and persevering fast bowler for Lancashire who led his county to the championship in 2011. That he has only played once for England – and that in a one-day international against Ireland – is scant reward for his talent. But he has his own county partly to blame. In 2006 he was selected for the England one-day squad, who were meeting in Southampton on Sunday, 11 June, before flying the next day to play Ireland on the Tuesday. Fletcher did not want any players to play on the Sunday. But Lancashire wanted Chapple to play in their C&G Trophy match against Derbyshire. Fletcher refused, but Simmons got involved and went to the ECB. Chapple was allowed to play, and flew down to join the team later that night. On the Monday at practice Fletcher forgot that Chapple should not bowl as many overs as the others because he had played the previous day. He broke down against Ireland, and never played again.

Geoff Miller, the current National Selector, makes a good point about the crux of Fletcher’s troubled relationship with the counties: ‘Whether Duncan actually said it or not, or whether it was misquoted, the feeling amongst the counties was that he had said “The standard of county cricket is poor”.’

Yes, there were undoubtedly aspects of county cricket that frustrated Fletcher. But he was hardly alone in that regard. He thoroughly enjoyed his two years at Glamorgan, even if he was distracted in the latter half of his second year, with the England job looming. Indeed he will admit now that he would have been better off joining England immediately. His greatest gripe with the county game was the volume of cricket played, leading to lazy habits. He used to be enraged with the slack running between the wickets and the lack of general intensity in the fielding, always signs of tired minds as well as tired bodies. And the excuse culture, so prevalent in county cricket, used to annoy him. For example, during slip-catching practice he would often encounter fielders pusillanimously pulling out of chances that bounced in front of them, making the excuse that fingers could easily be broken. It was the sort of attitude with which Fletcher would have no truck. ‘Well done, you’ve saved a certain wicket,’ he would say sarcastically when a catch was dropped.

Fletcher used to talk about the ‘cup of tea brigade’ in English cricket. In other words players who would turn up to a county ground early and be more interested in having their cup of tea than actually doing some hard graft. There is a curious habit in county cricket of players arriving ridiculously early, and then doing very little. I know that the Australians who came to Glamorgan, like Matthew Elliott, Jimmy Maher and Mike Kasprowicz, simply could not understand this behaviour. It is why it makes me laugh when county championship matches start an hour later the morning after late-finishing floodlit matches the night before. It is ludicrous that this has to happen at all, but I bet all the players are there at a similar time to usual. I know I would have been. The truth is that it is very difficult to sleep after day/night matches anyway. The brain is still racing. It cannot be calmed with the flick of a switch.

Fletcher did have respect for county cricket, but the England team was more important. And central contracts have worked – it is as simple as that. ‘They were the single most important thing for the good of the England side,’ says MacLaurin now. Before their implementation, England won 33.5% of its Test matches. Since their introduction in 2000 and up until the end of the 2012 Pakistan series they had won 45%. Enough said.

They worked immediately, if truth be told. One only had to consider what a threat the fast-bowling duo of Darren Gough and Andrew Caddick became. They stayed fit throughout the summer of 2000, sharing sixty-four Test wickets and only having to play three county championship matches each. This naturally evoked thoughts of what might have been. Caddick was thirty-one years old and Gough thirty by 2000.

Caddick was always over-bowled at Somerset, with the line peddled disingenuously that the more overs he bowled the better he bowled. Even though I found him a bit of a prat to play against, he could have been a great England fast bowler rather than just a very good one. His omission from the Ashes tour party in 1998/99, despite 105 first-class wickets in 1998, still counts as one of the most mutton-headed pieces of selection in recent times. He bowled 59,663 balls in first-class cricket, but only 13,558 were for England. Glenn McGrath bowled 41,759 balls all told, but 29,248 of those were for Australia. That’s a difference of around 47% between the two. It is a tragedy.

With central contracts has come continuity of selection. Some have, of course, accused that of being a closed shop, but it is a far and welcoming cry from the bad old days when a player was only concerned about making the side for the next Test, regardless of the result of the one in which he was actually playing. Revolving-door selections played with players’ minds, none more so, in my opinion, than Hick and Ramprakash. Had central contracts been in place at the start of their careers, I’m pretty sure we would now be considering their Test-playing days in a very different light, certainly as regards Hick, who was dropped more times in his Test career than a cockney drops his aitches.

There were other significant advancements under MacLaurin’s tenure. First was the splitting of the county champion ship into two divisions in 2000. This was not easy, of course. It had been proposed in 1997, but a vote of the First Class Forum had decided against it 12–7.

David Morgan was still against the idea. ‘Both David Acfield [chairman of the cricket advisory committee] and I were opposed to two divisions because we felt you’d have a second class of first-class county,’ he says. That was a very common worry at the time, easily assuaged by the promise that every county would still receive the same ECB fee payments every year. So there was no penalty for being rubbish.

At this stage there was also no penalty for squandering the money on cheap foreigners imported through the back-door. Yes, we are talking about those delightful EU passport holders and Kolpaks who have caused me so much anguish throughout my journalistic career. Some might say that I was like a broken record, such was my persistent and vociferous opposition to these chaps from abroad. But I felt it was an issue that needed urgent and plaintive addressing.

Counties were clearly making short-term decisions in search of instant success. Because the European Court of Justice’s 2003 ruling in the case of Slovakian handball player Maros Kolpak allowed a sportsman from any nation with an associate trading relationship with the EU to play freely as a professional wherever he liked, they were signing cheap South Africans by the bucketload and neglecting the much longer process of producing and nurturing homegrown players. I liked Ashley Giles’s phrase at the time, likening many counties’ recruitment drives to ‘easy internet shopping’.

I was not, and am not, xenophobic. That much should be obvious from the thrust of this book. It is, after all, about two foreigners and the tremendous good they have done for English cricket. I have always been a huge fan of overseas players in county cricket. How couldn’t I be when Viv Richards turned Glamorgan’s fortunes around at the start of the nineties, teaching a talented but flabby-minded team how to win, and when Waqar Younis added the cream to a long-baked cake in the winning of the county championship in 1997? But they were top-notch overseas players; the sadness is that their ilk is rarely available any more. The huge increase in year-round international cricket, allied to the arrival of the IPL, has seen to that. The days of top foreigners playing full seasons and staying loyal to counties for years are gone, and in their place for a while came a host of jobbing, opportunistic mercenaries.

I have never blamed the individuals involved. They were, still are, just cricketers desperate to earn a living. Andy Flower signed initially for Essex in 2002 as an overseas player but then used his British passport to play as a local after retiring from international cricket; his brother Grant, who joined Essex in 2005, used the Kolpak ruling. They knew and know my feelings.

Top-quality individuals from abroad, in which category both Flowers undoubtedly fall, can add enormous value, of that there can never be any doubt. But as in life, it is a question of balance. When in May 2008 Leicestershire played Northampton shire in a championship match and there were eleven players on the field not qualified to play for England, a tipping point had clearly been reached. Thankfully the system of performance-related fee payments, begun in 2005 by the ECB, has been strengthened, and, along with the tightening of entry qualifications by the Home Office, the problem has diminished.

The proliferation of Kolpaks has been my only regret regarding two divisions. I doubt that was troubling MacLaurin when he declared a two-divisional championship not to be his first-choice solution. As expressed in 1997 in his blueprint document for the England game ‘Raising the Standard’, he wanted a conference-style system, with three groups of six, and the six teams in one group playing the twelve other counties to make twelve championship matches a season. But this was rejected immediately by the counties; all the more funny then that it should arise again recently in discussion about the domestic structure.

But there is always discussion about the domestic structure. As I write, Morgan has just produced a review into the business of county cricket. It was not supposed to be specifically about the structure, but that is how it turned out, and it caused predictable uproar.

There always has been discussion about the county structure, and always will be, especially with eighteen counties, which is, of course, far too many. But to complain about that number is like complaining about old age. We need to get over it. I can’t see the number being reduced during my lifetime.

What this does mean, though, is that there will always be compromise when considering the domestic structure. And so when the two-divisional championship was introduced, it came with the proviso of three up, three down. That was far too much fluidity, but that was what the counties wanted. Too many of them were fearful of being marooned in the second tier.

There was also a ridiculous early imbalance in the financial incentives available. The only prize money on offer was for the top two in each division, with the winner of division two receiving just £10,000 less than the runner-up in division one. The more materialistic cricketers quickly realized it was better to be in a yo-yo team, flitting between divisions, than a solid outfit in third or fourth in the first division.

Nowadays things are a little different, not least because of a significant upturn in the prize money available. Back in 2000 Surrey won £105,000 for securing the county championship. In 2010 the figure on offer was a very healthy £550,000, although it is spread between players (70%) and the county (30%), whereas before it was simply divided among the players. But it still beggars belief that in 2010 the division two winners received £135,000 for effectively finishing tenth, while the team third in division one received just £115,000. In 2011 it was slightly more complicated with the county’s national insurance payment taken into account in the prize monies, but essentially the winners of the second division still earned £20,000 more than the third-placed county in division one.

Only in 2006 did the structure become two up, two down in terms of promotion and relegation. Me? I’d have one up, one down. Then we’d have an elite division, which must surely be the aim.

As it is, I suppose we should be grateful that the vote for change came at all. But it did come, in December 1998. Two counties abstained, but there were still fifteen counties in favour of two divisions, with one against. ‘An historic decision heralding the most radical change in the structure of the first-class game since the championship was first rationalized in 1890,’ wrote MacLaurin of it in his autobiography. ‘This was, indeed, a quiet revolution.’

It was. And two divisions have been of enormous benefit. Intensity, competitiveness and professionalism have all increased. Even Morgan has been impressed. ‘It hasn’t quite worked out as I thought,’ he says, ‘and quite clearly when I talk to cricketers – and I always regard cricketers as extremely important people! [said with a smile and a knowing glance across the sitting-room of his Newport home] – they regard two divisions as a success. So I’m ready to admit that I was wrong.’

The other important initiative under MacLaurin’s watch that helped improve England’s fortunes was the setting up of a National Academy. Again, this was a long time in coming. The counties had approved its introduction by a vote of 16–2 as far back as 1995, and in June that year the former Australian leg-spinner Peter Philpott had been asked to be head coach at a proposed site in Shenley, Hertfordshire.

In October of that year Mark Nicholas, the recently retired former captain of Hampshire, was also asked by Dennis Silk, the chairman of the TCCB, to run the Academy. But by November the board’s executive committee had performed an about-turn, reckoning Silk had overstepped the boundaries of his power, and an enraged Philpott, who had turned down other job offers, had received a fax stating that the idea was on hold.

It remained on hold until December 1999 when it was decided to try again. Hugh Morris, then the ECB’s performance director, was the man tasked with its setting up. ‘It was around the time that lottery funding became available,’ recalls Morris enthusiastically of a project that was to prove the making of him as a cricket administrator, ‘and Sport England [who were administering the Lottery Sports Fund] basically said, “Dream! We’ve got more money than we’ve ever had before. We need to hear your plans, and then we will sit down and assess them.” I had to work with my staff to put a world-class performance structure together, of which the central part was the Academy. We spent over two years doing it. We looked at the Australian Academy. We looked at Liverpool FC’s Academy. We did desk studies on academies around the world. We sent people to South Africa, and to America too.’

Morris was adamant that the Academy had to sit outside the first-class game, otherwise it would just become a county academy with a national badge on it. ‘We wanted to rub shoulders with other sports and learn from them,’ he says, ‘so we began an open tender process, and had seventy-five expressions of interest from inside and outside the game. Then we sent out a very detailed invitation to tender, and that frightened a lot of people, so we got down to eight or nine serious bids.’ Eventually Morris decided it was going to be at Loughborough, and after similar due deliberation the ECB’s board agreed.

Next came the matter of funding. The centre was going to cost £4.52 million. Lottery funding would provide £4 million, but what about the other half a million? In stepped the Allan and Nesta Ferguson Trust with a generous grant. It wasn’t going to cost the ECB or the counties anything, and for the first four years Sport England provided £2 million annually for its running.

In November 2003, fifteen years after Australia had opened its academy in Adelaide, the Queen formally opened the National Academy building at Loughborough. It was, and still is, the largest bespoke indoor cricket centre in the world, measuring approximately 70m by 25m, with six lanes in a hall long enough to accommodate fast bowlers off full runs with a wicketkeeper standing back.

For the two winters of 2001/02 and 2002/03 before the opening of the centre at Loughborough – renamed the National Cricket Performance Centre after the (Ken) Schofield Report in 2007 – the Academy was based in Adelaide. England were unashamedly copying Australia, and why wouldn’t they, after just losing their seventh successive Ashes series at home that summer in 2001? So it also made sense for an Australian to run it. More to the point, the Australian who had been running the Australian Academy.

Step forward Rod Marsh, the legendary Australia wicket-keeper, who then ran the English equivalent for four years. ‘There were a lot of Doubting Thomases about the Academy,’ says Morris, ‘so we needed somebody with real gravitas. Bringing Rod Marsh in was done specifically to raise eyebrows, and show we meant business.’

Among the first intake in 2001 were Strauss, Flintoff, Steve Harmison, Simon Jones, Ian Bell, Graeme Swann, Ryan Sidebottom, Chris Tremlett, Rob Key, Owais Shah, Alex Tudor and Chris Schofield. That’s twelve players out of an intake of eighteen who went on to play for England. Seven of them went on to become Ashes winners, and eleven of them have either scored a century or taken five wickets in an innings for England.

It would be easy to conclude that the Academy was an instant success. It wasn’t. It took years of tinkering and tailoring to arrive at the point in 2010/11 when England’s Academy could be termed, without fear of contradiction, a world leader and an undoubted producer of world-class talent. They had long had the ‘Merlyn’ spin-bowling machine (which all eighteen counties now possess), which was so useful for England and their playing of Shane Warne during the 2005 Ashes, and the Hawk-Eye tracking system. Now everyone else in the world marvelled at their two latest technological advancements: the ‘Pro-Batter’, a virtual reality bowling machine where the batsman watches an opposition bowler running in on a screen before the ball is delivered, and ‘TrackMan’, a device that measures the revolutions a spinner is able to impart on the ball. In an instant Pro-Batter eliminates the age-old problem with bowling machines, that you could never time your pick-up and trigger movements as you would in a match situation. Indeed when I was a teenager, so much trouble did I have with synchronizing my movements on the bowling machine that I decided to stand with bat aloft, à la Graham Gooch.

The Pro-Batter, based on a device used by American baseball batters, is still not perfect, in that there is a small delay as the ball supposedly comes out of the bowler’s hand, and some England batsmen have told me it is especially difficult to pick up bouncers from it, but, crucially, the length can be altered without any cue from the operator. England’s batsmen undoubtedly benefited from it before the Ashes of 2010/11. ‘For me, the great advantage is that you can time your trigger movements as the bowler – be it [Mitchell] Johnson, [Ben] Hilfenhaus or whoever – is coming in,’ said Strauss.

As for the TrackMan, you often hear commentators talking about a spinner getting ‘good revs’ on the ball. Now they can be more certain of what they are talking about. Adapted from a device used by golfers, it’s a small camera placed behind the bowler’s arm that can measure the revolutions per minute generated by various bowlers. It should not surprise anyone that a wrist-spinner generates more than a finger-spinner, so of the England bowlers tested in 2010 Yorkshire’s leg-spinner Adil Rashid recorded the highest figure (an average of 2,312), while of the finger-spinners Swann was top (2,083), with Monty Panesar (1,750), James Tredwell (1,682) and Mike Yardy (1,350) behind him.

How today’s position contrasts with the Academy’s beginning. I have to admit that I was never sure about Marsh. Yes, there was certainly merit in his bark (‘You overpaid Pommie bastards!’ was apparently a constant scream to his quivering academicians) and his devotion to hard work, even if its implementation was sometimes crude in the extreme, but it just seemed to be a little too much about him at the Academy. It was all about how good a job he was doing. When he became an England selector in 2003, it was obvious that he was rather keen to promote those who had come under his wing. Thus his liking of wicketkeeper Chris Read, and his infamous rant in 2004, in front of the MCC players gathered at Lord’s for the season’s pipe-opener against Sussex, when he discovered that Read had been dropped for Geraint Jones for the final Test of the West Indies tour in Antigua. Marsh and Fletcher never got on. They got on even less after that.

I remember calling Marsh in 2005 to ask him about a piece I was doing on players who had struggled after they had left the Academy. I was thinking about the likes of Hampshire’s Derek Kenway (an academician in that original intake in 2001/02), who had a shocker of a county season in 2002, averaging just 11.82 with the bat, and was out of the professional game altogether by the end of 2005, and others like Yorkshire’s Matthew Wood. Marsh thought I was specifically talking about Glamorgan’s David Harrison, who’d just returned to his county after a winter with the Academy with a bowling action considerably different from that with which he’d arrived there. Suddenly he was jumping extraordinarily wide on the crease. He was half the bowler he had been previously. Glamorgan were not happy, and made their feelings clear to the Academy. Marsh thought I was stirring trouble about that, and in general questioning him as much as his methods. I wasn’t. I actually had some sympathy with the situation. It was obvious to me that if Harrison were to become an England bowler, he would need to increase his pace. The Academy concurred, and that was at the heart of their work with him during that winter of 2004/05. Unfortunately it resulted in a changing of action. If you don’t venture, you don’t discover …

Marsh was in charge for two years when the Academy was based in Australia, and two at the new Loughborough centre. Early on he made a prescient comment to Morris. ‘We’ve run an Academy in Australia for thirteen years and it’s changed every single year,’ he said. And that is what has happened in England. It was not always necessarily for the best, but there has certainly been considerable change, not least in the name of the side representing it abroad, whether it has been the National Academy, England A or, as now, England Lions (or Elite Player Programme side – EPP), with selection now at a point where it is very nearly a second-choice England side that takes the field on most occasions.

Cock-ups are much fewer on the ground, and the selection process much further back down the line has also been revolutionized. Gone are the days of England fielding Under 15 and Under 17 sides to play international matches. Instead, at the conclusion of the annual Bunbury Festival, so enthusiastically organized for the twenty-fifth time in 2011 by David English, an England Development Programme (EDP) squad is selected with the Under 19 side as the long-term goal. Players are added and cut as the years progress.

It is no random selection process guided by vested interests and old school ties. That used to happen, believe me. My best man, Adrian Knox, a rather rough-and-ready rugby player, went to Whitecross Comprehensive School in my hometown of Lydney in Gloucestershire. When playing for the West of England in the old regional Under 15 tournament that pre-dated the Bunbury Festival, he scored more runs than anyone else. By a distance. But he didn’t make the England Under 15 team selected from that tournament. A lot of public schoolboys did.

Now it is rather different. Morris had sorted the structure of the senior team, then the Lions/Academy, so in 2010 the pathways to the national Under 19 side were his last mission. And after a disappointing ICC Under 19 World Cup performance that year, it was quite a mission. But Simon Timson, the ECB’s head of science and medicine, has studied NFL scouting processes in the United States, and now the ECB are using hard evidence rather than mere selectorial whim. They use tests in the four categories of technical, physical, psychological and fielding, as well as bare cricketing statistics.

That is not to say it is foolproof just yet either. I know of a young lad who only just made his regional side for the Bunbury Festival in 2011, after much persuasion from a coach who knows his onions. He then impressed so much that he only just missed out on the fourteen players selected for the EDP. Had there been fifteen he would have been in.

Research has shown that cricketers who reach the world’s top ten have usually made their first-class debuts by the age of nineteen, and by twenty-three are playing international cricket. The ECB pull no punches about the function of the EDP. It is the beginning of the line ‘to produce the world’s best cricketers for England by the age of twenty-seven’. Some will fall by the wayside quickly. Some may reappear as late developers in county cricket. But there is now a scientific talent identification process in place. Some might even say England have managed to put in place a system that circumvents the clunky county system. It is very clever indeed.

These days more home Lions fixtures are arranged (you can’t expect strong opposition abroad if you don’t provide it at home), even if they enrage the counties who are reluctant to release their players. The counties need to pipe down on that issue. Those fixtures are a vital part of the England process, and the players recognize that. They know where they stand in the pecking order, and to be selected for a home Lions match is to know that a full cap is not that far away.

At the start of the 2011 season I interviewed Craig Kieswetter, the Somerset wicketkeeper/batsman who had enjoyed a successful Lions tour of the West Indies. He had just suffered a thigh muscle strain, meaning he would miss the Lions’ four-day match against Sri Lanka at Derby. He was genuinely ‘gutted’, as he put it. This was a chap who had already played one-day and T20 cricket for the full England team (a World Cup winner no less in T20, after England’s success in the Caribbean in 2010), and he was bemoaning missing his first home Lions match. There was a time during the early years of the Academy when players simply did not want to be involved. Weeks and months of perceived incarceration at Loughborough were mind-numbing and ambition-destroying. Now Kieswetter was saying, ‘To be part of the Lions set-up is unbelievable. Every player has got the same ambition to play for England. In a county set-up you get some players who are quite happy to be a county player, but with the Lions the whole atmosphere changes completely because everyone has a common goal and is training the hardest, eating the healthiest, doing everything they can to play for England. The whole environment is one of pure success and enjoyment.’

I was gobsmacked by these comments. I genuinely was. He was the first player I’d heard speak so glowingly about the Academy process. I’d heard some positive things in the past, of course – indeed my former Glamorgan team-mate Mark Wallace had written in the Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack of 2011 that ‘the winters I spent at the Academy were among the most enjoyable and rewarding periods of my career’ – but this was eye-opening stuff.

I had often been critical of the Academy, especially at times of the current director David Parsons, who took over in 2007 but did not play first-class cricket. I felt there was just not the technical expertise available that players close to the England side deserve. It was probably a little harsh, because Parsons is what they call in very modern parlance an excellent ‘facilitator’. In other words he is rather like a midwife overseeing the act of childbirth. He assists in the actual delivery, but is not the producer of the end result.

The shift can be traced back to Peter Moores. After a successful spell as coach of Sussex – in 2003 they won their first county championship title in a 164-year history – he was appointed director of the Academy in 2005. He made an immediate change. ‘As soon as I got there I realized that it wasn’t right that it was a National Academy,’ he says. ‘I thought, “This has got to be a Performance Centre.” It wasn’t servicing the England team, and it had to do that.’

Fletcher’s repeated mantra as England coach was that he should be ‘putting the roofs on players’ techniques, not digging their foundations’. And how right that statement is. But Fletcher was astounded at the technical naivety of many of the players picked in his England Test teams. For instance, Caddick could not bowl a slower ball. So Fletcher showed him not just how to bowl it, but also where to bowl it – ideally wide of off-stump so that the batsman, having checked his shot, then has to reach for the ball.

Moores was conscious of Fletcher’s mantra. ‘I thought to myself, “This is where we should be building the foundations”,’ he says. ‘But I did not have enough coaches at my disposal. So I went to see Gordon Lord [the ECB’s head of elite coach development] and said, “I’ve got no coaches! Who are the best candidates currently on the Level Four coaching course?”’

Lord mentioned a chap by the name of Flower, then still playing at Essex. Andy, that is. ‘I watched him coach,’ says Moores, ‘and I liked his style. He was giving simple messages, which is what I like.’

That winter Flower began the first of two winters coaching at the Academy as a specialist batting coach. Little did anyone know then where that was going to lead.