Sir Andrew Strauss: How to Win the Ashes in Australia (Ep.98)

0:00So many England tours of Australia have sort of gone awry before the first ball has ever been bowled. One thing I would say about Australia, everyone thinks about pace. And when we won there in 2010-11, it wasn't based on pace. It was actually based much more on bounce. Our strategy in Australia was much more to contain and suffocate rather than blast people out. What you can't afford to be is a sort of one-trick pony where it's all on, we've got to take wickets with a new ball, and then if that doesn't happen, we've got nothing to fall back on. I was just sick and tired of us repeating the same old mistakes in white ball cricket, playing sort of hesitant, antiquated version of the game when everyone else was playing it differently.

0:33the difficulty with having your best players playing all formats is you can't prioritise everything at the same time. I think the average county salary is£40 ,000. There's no sustainability in county cricket. I got engaged to do a high performance review into English cricket a couple of years ago. So if you look at our performance over 40 years, we've been a mediocre cricket team relative to Australia back in the day, the West Indies, South Africa. So the driver was if we really want England to be successful, this is what we should do. And we ruffled feathers. But There's no point in trying to keep everyone happy and doing nothing that actually moves the needle.

1:09Hello and welcome to The Business of Sport, the show that takes you behind the scenes with the industry's leading owners, operators and athletes. Sir Andrew Strauss is the last England captain to win the Ashes in Australia, so what better time to get him in the hot seat? Aside from the timing being perfect, this is a show I have wanted to do from day one. This is not just because he is one of England's greatest captains and batsmen, but he has also played an integral role in shaping the success of English cricket across formats in recent years. He transformed white ball cricket as director of professional cricket at the ECB, culminating in that most memorable World Cup win in 2019.

1:45In doing so, you could say he laid the foundations for the style of test cricket the team is now playing today. We recorded this before the disaster, if you're an England fan, that occurred in Perth, but that makes some of the frighteningly accurate observations made in this conversation even more impressive. It is, of course, a reveal of how to win in Australia, but it is much more than that. From dealing with maverick talent to how to sort out domestic cricket, we are delighted to welcome Andrew to the Business of Sport. Ever wanted to invest in sports? Ever thought about owning a stake in football, cricket or even Formula One?

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3:21Andrew it is so great to have you in the studio thank you so much for joining us on this incredibly shitty rainy Monday it's a great pleasure to be here thank you for having me as you know we're the podcast that really cuts through the kind of different types of conversations it's not just about the gossip we love the business side we really want to get into that area so you know with that in mind who's going to win the ashes well I mean that is always the impossible question to answer it i mean truthfully i think it's going to be hard for us if we draw the series we'll have done very well does that sound negative that sounds quite yes it does why do you think it's going to be hard for us because we never win not just a series we never win a test match in australia we've hardly won a test match for 30 years apart from there is one notable exception which we might come to later but um it's a hard place at all very unique conditions so uh in two things in particular the bounce especially in perth and at brisbane much more bounce than we'd be used to in this country and our batsmen generally struggle against that uh secondly the kookaburra ball so using kookaburra ball behaves very we're getting quite technical here but behaves very differently to the dukes ball it only swings for a very short period of time so the aussie bowlers tend to be faster than our bowlers they tend to hit the deck harder um and our bowlers are still used to sort of just floating the ball up there and swinging it which doesn't really work in australia so you have to change your approach the way you bowl in australia and as a batsman you need to be able to deal with the the ball that's bouncing more at you can we not just simulate those or create those environments for our players in training environments well you can but so we try to bring in the Crookedborough ball in domestic cricket in this country and everyone hated it because like oh well no one's taking any wickets it's too easy for the batsmen and that's a slightly symptomatic of the issue we have in this country which is we all want England to do well unless we're asked to do something different to what we normally do the point being if you've been dealing with those conditions all your life from the age of 10 you're going to be better off on a day-to-day basis than someone's just been preparing for a couple of months to do it and that's well that sort of asymmetry is always what we've had to deal with in australia and generally we haven't dealt with it very well i don't think it was that negative to say tutu i mean look let's face it based on the performances as you said that we've had recently i think the stat is we've won one of the last 14 test matches there so you know that is always going to create a mentality of slight negativity but this feels like for the first time we're actually a bit positive going in you know The talk is that we're going to compete, we're going to do well.

6:08How important is it going into a series like this, and you have the personal experience, that that belief not just exists in the team, but also that you get that feeling from the fans and the media? Yeah, I think that's a very good point. I mean, so many England tours of Australia have sort of gone awry before the first ball has ever been bowled. You know, the warm-up games go badly. The media start talking about all the inadequacies of the England team, et cetera, et cetera. you know maybe one or two players get injured and then you feel like the trains left the tracks before the series start certainly the 2006 ashes where we just won in 2005 you know all those heady celebrations at trafalgar square arrived in australia 2006 michael vaughan was injured we lost our warm-up games and from that moment onwards it was an absolute car crash lost that series 5-0 but so i think going in there with optimism i think this england team there's a real buzz and spark about it i think obviously brilliant captain coach combination and the way they play is engaging and so almost by default i think we're going to land some blows on the australian team the australian team by the way is probably the weakest it's been for a while and certainly in the batting side um so we're going to land some blows but whether it's going to be enough to you know to to get all the way through that series over five test matches and beat them remains to be seen.

7:29This is perfectly timed because you were the last captain to win down there. We're talking, you know, at the start you said we may get to it, but the 2010-11 series was our last victory, which seems like a long time ago, but actually if you look at number of away victories on both sides, they are not very common. What do you see? Do you see things in this current team that you looked at going into that series going, do you know what? There are some of those similarities. There are some things here that we'll really grab into. I think you've got some match winners in the team now and plenty of them so you look at that batting lineup with Brook and Roots and Stokes in particular those are guys that can play the sort of innings that you need to the match defining innings and then we've got plenty of pace with our bowling lineup I still not convinced we got the bowling lineup to take 20 wickets It's consistently there, but that remains to be seen.

8:21I think one thing we did very well in 2010-11 is we got the preparation spot on. We did a lot of time speaking to people that had either ex-England captains who'd been on Ashes tours that had gone wrong there. We'd spent a lot of experts on Australian cricket. We spent 12 months talking to the players about what's going to be unique about a touring in Australia and how do we sort of contend with some of the issues around this sort of goldfish bowl you're in and not being able to get away from it and the Aussies on your case all the time so we I think we went there very well prepared we we had three warm-up games and we sort of treated that as a series in itself because we knew how important momentum was going into the first test and then we hit the ground running in Brisbane what I worry about with this team is they haven't really got any preparation phase they've got a one warm-up game against the england lions and then they're into the first test so looking at that from afar i'd go have you got your preparation right because if things start going bad in on ash's tour it's almost impossible to sort of turn that momentum around so that that's what i'd be worried about I think in terms of the capability of the players, we have the players to cause some problems for that Australian team.

9:44There's no doubt about that. On the bowling front, how important is the fitness of that raw pace for us going to be when you look at Wood and Archer availability? Yeah, I think especially without a sort of out-and-out spinner, I think you're going to have to hit them hard up front with a new ball. so you know Wood and Arch have both got very checkered injury histories and so for them to play maybe three out of the five tests you'd probably take that so it's not just them it's the the rest of the the bowling group as well you know how I suppose how way how well they sort of fit in for each other and one thing I would say about Australia everyone thinks about pace I'm not sure it is all about pace actually the conditions in each ground are very different and when we won there in 2010 11 wasn't based on pace it was actually based much more on bounce so we had like tremlett we had uh anderson and broad um we had bresnan and actually our our strategy in australia was much more to sort of contain and suffocate rather than blast people out so this is a very different tactic lots of ways to skin the cat and this can definitely work for us but what you can't afford to be is a sort of one trick pony where it's all on we've got to take wickets with a new ball and then if that doesn't happen we've got nothing to fall back on you had graham swan in that team yeah and spin obviously therefore was you know an important part of it you mentioned there that spin's been a concern here if you're going into this where are those overs coming from where are you looking at it going right in the middle of those innings when you do have to grind stuff out.

11:17Do we have that set up to be able to do that? Because that personally is a fan outside of the game is an area where straight away you look at it and you go, oh, I'm quite worried about that. Well, you know, the Aussies will definitely try and target Basher here because if you can whack the spinner out of the attack, then you've got to go back to those fast bowlers who are looking to sort of rest and recuperate. I think Stokes has got a massive role to play in this, if fit, because he's proved that he can bowl brilliantly in those middle overs and he can get the ball reversing really well also um but again you look at him you look at archer you look at wood all three of them have got pretty checkered injury records so you know you are literally having your fingers crossed hoping that they all stay fit through that tour um but as i say like i think we've got more of an opportunity than we've had for quite some time based partly on what we've got on our team but also partly a an Australian team that is quite old now uh it's very reliant on their bowling attack Cummins has been injured himself and you look at Hazelwood you know there's no guarantee those guys are going to stay fit um and so uh and a vulnerable top order uh batting lineup which Australia haven't had for a while now but you know I think the the last two series there I think if you'd ask any England fan truly do you think we're going to win this they go no we haven't got a chance here but hopefully if we win a test we've done well I think this time the narrative is slightly different.

12:47Tell us about the value the importance this is your like this is your bread and butter right the importance of opening the batting it's one of the best things in sport thing and it's probably one of the hardest jobs in sport you're exposed you're scrutinized the mentality that's required to do it how did you approach that uh well look i think probably by trying not to overthink it you know the truth is cricket is a psychologically very challenging game and i think opening the batting in cricket is even more so because you're facing the best bowlers with all the odds in their favor right and so do you feel alone because cricket is a weird sport where it's like it's not really a team sport in the primary actions of bowling you're bowling alone and batting you're batting yeah and when you're opening the batting you feel very alone uh but i think what you need to be able to do is sort of suck up pressure as an opening batsman um and understand there's a little period there where the odds are in the bowlers favor so it's about for me it was about let's get through that period i mean the current england team just go and whack it but in my time I need to suck up a little bit here and then earn the right to get on top of the bowlers.

13:59I think what played out when I lived back in my career, my super strength, so to speak, was my temperament. I didn't realize that at the time, but I was able to keep quite calm in emotionally charged environments. And therefore, when the ball's flying around your ears and you're in a high pressure match, I was able just to watch the ball. Whereas a lot of people, the situation, the occasion gets to them. and so I think myself and Alistair Cook both had that sort of skill was just concentrate on the ball, don't get too sucked up in the emotion of things, do what you've done millions of times before and that's probably the best route.

14:39As an opening batsman in particular, I think if you're a middle order player, you can sort of use that emotion, you can feed off a bit more. Which game did you feel most nervous going out to bat into? I would say the fifth test of the 2005 Ashes. So if you remember back to 2005, we hadn't won the Ashes for goodness knows how long. This amazing Australian team with Ponting and Hayden and Langer and Warne and McGrath and all those guys who were pretty much unbeatable, right? They were the invincible Australian team for the best part of a decade. You get to the Oval, we're 2-1 up in the series. All we need to do is draw that game.

15:17We win the toss. it's like right one good innings here and we've got this series in the bag and so walking out to bat that day you're like you know interestingly it's that feeling of there's a there's a lot to lose here not that much to gain because we've already done the hard work and so mentally it was like right can you just stay in the moment don't think about what might be happening in four or five days time we just sort of stay in the moment there and I just remember feeling unbelievably nervous for that game when you have bret lee running at you are you like oh shit well i'd take him over mcgrath and warner any day of the way yeah i mean warner was the hardest mate without doubt because he could play on 20 years of experience of humiliating england batsmen and he was the conductor of the show you know he could make you feel uncomfortable he could intimidate you and you also unpredictability of it well just this guy's a genius you know what he could do with the ball was incredible and then he knew that as well so he would feed off that and the little comments he'd make and so comments like well i mean well just as an example in the fourth test in that series um halfway through we were chasing 127 to win we were about i don't know 30 for two or something halfway through and over shane warne just stops everything goes straussie just want to let you know mate i'm getting you out this ball okay umps umpires do you hear that guys did everyone here that this ball i'm getting him out and so i'm sort of there tapping my back thinking you know what i really want to do i want to whack this for four so i'm thinking in my head i'm going to slog sweep him here and shut him up then i'm thinking no don't do that because then that's increasing him his chances of getting me out i'm just going to defend this ball and then i'm thinking oh no he's in my head here he's in my head so in my mind all i was thinking about is can i survive this one delivery just through the fact that he just put that out there i did manage to survive the delivery but i got out like an over or two later so it's just those little moments that he would sort of create this bit of theater about him versus you and of course as a batsman what you're trying to do is sort of depersonalize and just play the ball and not the man so it's an interesting study though because we often talk about the celebritization of sports stars and how stars are now bigger than the teams that they're in and when you look at someone like warne and the charisma and the gravitas that he held and the stardom that he had you could argue that nothing's actually changed the money is just the thing that's different now whereas there's just a lot more money than there was before yeah yeah i think that's fair enough i think shane warne's been as great a superstar as the game of cricket's ever had actually you know he he really did sort of cut through he was interesting beyond just cricket fans he he had a quite a colorful private life that the front pages of the newspaper got stuck into as well but um he was a unique individual I mean obviously so sad that he's left us so young but um I feel like it's one of the the great privileges that I had in my career to face him and have a bit of success had a lot of failure against him but had a little bit of success as well and just going back to that moment that I felt most nervous that that fifth test match at the oval getting getting 100 in that moment I think was you know sport a lot of the time is a battle with the opposition but it's also a battle with yourself and so it was like if i can do it today you know you can do it anywhere when did you lose the battle with yourself most memorably well i don't think it was one occasion i think what happened is i was lucky i had an incredible start to my england career you know i think i scored thousand runs in my first 10 test matches was averaging 60 odd uh you know i think i scored 512 games or whatever and this was like i didn't even think i was good enough to be an england player really so it was like i am living the dream here scored 100 on debut you know and then genuinely disbelieving on of how much i achieved in such a short period of time but then what you realize about elite sport is you just got to keep doing it and in fact the more success you have the more expectation increases about how often you do it or what your level of performance is and so what I found after the first year and a half of playing for England is I got sucked into this wow I've got to go out perform and expectations are high and I'm started worrying a little bit about well if I don't perform then there's a young guy called Alistair Cook knocking on the door and I might find myself out of the team so I got in a bit of a negative mindset and that increasingly consumed me over a period of 12 or 18 months where I became a bit more hesitant I didn't back my technique as much I didn't have that beautiful naivety that I had when I first came into the England team and so I had a period where I really struggled I didn't score 100 for 12 months or so and got to a stage in early 2008 against New Zealand where I'd got dropped for a few games came back in the team, scored no runs in the first two test matches, got a duck in the first innings of the third test match, and I walked out to bat, I knew and I think everyone else knew that if I didn't score runs, if I probably didn't get 100 in this innings, I would be dropped and probably dropped for good.

20:43And the most amazing thing happened to me, which was having had 18 months of fearing getting dropped from the England Crete team, I sort of almost accepted it and went, you know what, in all likelihood this might be my last innings for England I'm not going to worry about it I'm just going to go out and appreciate playing for England for the last time what will be will be just let it go all that sort of fear and uncertainty and stress I just let it go and said I'm just going to go out and play today and got 177 and stayed in the team when you were dropped how did they tell you uh yeah so that i got dropped for the schlanker tour so that david graveney who's the chairman selector said i've got good news and bad news uh the good news is that you've retained your central contract so which is a good thing because you get paid a lot more if you're centrally contracted than just as a county player the bad news is we're leaving you out of the tour to schlanker um so that was a bit of a hammer blow you know especially because i would then in my mind going yeah but look at everything i've achieved in england shirt over two and a half years we won the ashes you know you know I'd scored I think 800s by then I was slightly flabbergasted but then that's what you realize about elite sport you know what happened yesterday doesn't matter it's about where you are today and the future needs of the team and you've got to keep performing time and time again and the longer you play the more you need to perform consistently how important was what you brought from a cultural side a personality side that then became captaincy and leadership how important was that do you think to your selection in that yeah i think people felt like i i contributed more than just with the bat there's no doubt about that um i think i was always relatively cerebral relative to the rest of the team which is not necessarily saying that much but i i was always helping the sort of captain the coach and some ideas about strategy and tactics and what we might do um and i was always quite interested in this very I suppose there's a dynamic situation in a team where you have all these different personalities coming together and sometimes it all feels like you're in sync and other times it feels like you're very out of sync so you know I was always felt like I was playing a role in the leadership of the team but truthfully it does come back to performances you can't hide from that performing is your currency and if you don't perform for long enough you're going to be out versus county what does that difference actually look like to play some materiality around it so well back in the day it was the probably the difference between a county contract which was probably about 80 or 100k a year to a central contract i think was probably around sort of 300 grand but also obviously if you're playing for the england cricket team you get all sorts of bonuses and appearance fees.

23:40And then, of course, your own endorsement deals are all factored into whether you're playing for England or scoring runs for England and whatever. So it's like two completely different trajectories. The really interesting thing is when you're playing for the England cricket team, you sort of think that's going to last forever. But what you realize is most players, you're lucky to play 10 or 15 or 20 tests and then you sort of revert back to being a county player. So there's a lot riding on it, Not just that sort of scrutiny and that pressure of the media and all the spectators. There's also a lot of financial pressure.

24:13So when you fully load it in, I'm so sorry. I'm just kind of trying to understand the sustainability that these players have and how they should be thinking about their finances. If you have a central contract, you're an England player. If you think about appearance fees, playing, sponsorships, all in, how much are you taking home? I think these days you're probably like a million and a half, something around that. million and a half but you know that's for the top performing players and then some of them will go off and play in the IPL and they'll get quite a lot on top of that as well so I would say it's around that sort of mark but nowadays there's short form as well wrapped into some of it as well right yeah yeah exactly I mean I would have thought that Ben Stokes of this world would be earning quite a lot more than that with endorsements and what not did you have coaching did you guys think about financial sustainability when you were playing when you had your Freddie Flintoffs were you talking about business We had an awful, I mean, truthfully, there was a sort of financial advising firm that got recommended to us by the Professional Crews Association that was a disaster.

25:16So right at the start, a lot of the players I played with, probably the generation just before me, lost a lot of money in film schemes and property, high risk property things in Spain and all that sort of stuff. And so, you know, I had to learn that myself. I don't think we had the financial advice that we should have had. It was all about, oh, you've got a lot of excess income, right? So it all should be about capital growth. So this gets you into high risk things now, which was obviously back then in the financial advisors' interest because they got fat commissions on these things they got people into.

25:50But of course, what you need to realize in sport is that tap gets turned off very abruptly in your mid-30s. And so preserving your capital is crucially important. Did you and do you think your class did that well? I think we did it slightly better than the previous generation. But ultimately, it's a personal thing, right? So you all have your own financial advisors and you all make decisions based on the advice you're given. And so, yeah, I mean, I think I did it reasonably well. There are certain players I played with who've probably lost most of the money they've made already. And so unfortunately, the world of sport attracts people who are looking to exploit naivety, lack of experience, probably lack of intellect or whatever.

26:42And so I think the game of cricket, sport needs to do a much better job of giving the rights of advice to sports people. I mean, I know in this day and age, some of those top high profile sports people are getting involved in the investment side and getting equity in some of their endorsement deals and stuff like that, which makes a lot of sense. But I still think there are a lot of lambs to the slaughter, so to speak, in the sports world. Totally. Yeah, it builds into the shame one piece you were talking about a little bit, though, where the celebritization developing and growing. And obviously, social media has been huge for that.

27:17It wasn't just necessarily that we haven't had major sports stars. It was only the biggest ones that probably got the exposure, whether now more people can get the exposure because they have more freedom of their content, their channels. They can do stuff outside of the game, and that provides opportunities. But at the same time, they've still got to have the team around them to help them understand what the right things are. Yeah, and also they've got to allocate their time wisely in terms of focusing on what they need to be focusing on, which is performing day in and day out, but also at the same time understanding it doesn't last forever so getting your finances right is one thing but also what am I going to do with myself and my career finishes what else can I be learning now that's going to help me in that next phase and most cricketers don't do that very well at all I don't think do you find quite a lot of struggle with kind of mental health problems afterwards yeah massively I mean they say in sport you die twice don't you you know you die the day you retire and then obviously you die properly at the and I definitely recognize that, that feeling of being part of this incredible kind of institution where you're together 300 nights a year and you're traveling the world together and they're your surrogate family and then the next day you're out and the traveling circus carries on without you and you've lost what you were great at, you've lost that sense of purpose, you're probably not very skilled in anything other than cricket and for a lot of players they you know unfortunately they've got divorced in the process and they lost their family and it can be a very slippery slope alongside obviously you've lost that buzz of performance and the energy and all that sort of stuff and so yeah I mean it's it's really sad I think it's the great untold story is how hard life is post-career and most people it just doesn't fit nicely into that narrative of professional sport and living the dream and when you look at your era which person navigated that most successfully do you think well i mean that's a good question i think so the obvious thing is if you're an ex-singling captain or you're a very high profile cricketer you can go into broadcasting you can stay involved in the game personally i don't think that is a great option personally because i think you're from that moment onwards you're a slightly diminishing asset which and when the next group of players comes through you'll probably be pushed down the the pecking order and then left cast aside eventually i think players that have been able to use their profile and their brand to start something new and go down a different route i think that's the smart play and so when you look For a while, Freddie Flintoff did that very well going into mainstream TV, getting out of sport and into mainstream TV.

30:10And I suppose you would argue he's done that brilliantly full stop, actually. Top gear, I know he's obviously had some very challenging personal situations in the last year or so. But I think that would be a successful transition. You don't hear so much about the cricketers that go into business or whatever because it's a bit lower profile. but that's certainly what I've tried to do. I did a bit of broadcasting, did cricket administration, so I ran elite cricket for a few years, and then sort of went, actually, maybe I've learned enough now to get into business, and hopefully that is going to be a successful transition, but obviously, as we know with business, nothing is guaranteed, right?

30:49So you're on your own little roller coaster there. But I think what a lot of players do is, truthfully, they go, the only thing I know is cricket. I need to find a job in cricket and or I need to go and do after dinner speaking or whatever and then I just feel like you're leveraging the fact that you used to once play cricket and over time that leverage becomes smaller and smaller and smaller. We'll come back to the business and executive side but in there you reference someone like Freddie Flintoff you look at what makes some of these athletes now most appealing it is quite often having a different type of personality I don't want to necessarily just throw Maverick in there but let's say a talent or a way of approaching a game that is quite different to quite a lot of players that's great on that side but it can also present quite a lot of challenges in the game when you're looking after a team and you as captain having to run that and you know we've seen the challenges or the things that came out when kevin peterson was going through his things you you guys i think you've made up now and it's all you know you're all good but you publicly said and he probably publicly talked about the ability to adopt a maverick mentality in the way that that was managed in a sports team within the team environment.

31:58So how difficult is that? Well, was that for you? But also is that where you have these players that have that mercurial approach that's so valuable to a team, but you also have to operate it in the right way within a structured environment? No, it's very difficult. And I think, truthfully, when you look at a makeup of a team, the last thing you want is everyone seeing the world the same way, right? So if you have someone that is a bit of a maverick, that's got that X factor about them, that really gets turned on by those high pressure situations where the eyes of the world are on them, those guys are worth their weight in gold.

32:34And someone like KP was a great example of that X factor performer. So you'd be very stupid not to try and get the most out of those players in that team environment. You wouldn't want everyone to be like that. And you need probably some people like myself who are a bit more calm and composed and unemotional about things. So you need that sort of that blend. But, you know, teams do have superstars and that creates all sorts of interesting dynamics. So, you know, you have a lot of outside attention on them. You probably have some jealousy in the team with how they live their life. They're obviously not obviously, but sometimes looking to sort of differentiate themselves from the rest of the team.

33:16and so the job of the captain and the coach is really can you bind all of this together and my view with with kp and others was you've got to give them space to be themselves you can't constrain them too closely because you're sort of you're trying to knock down what makes them special and different but you have to do it within some broad kind of guide rails and of course that situation with kp was a situation where i think i think we got to a stage where what was in his interest was diametrically opposite to what was in the team's interest and vice versa and then as a leader you have to step in because otherwise there's no you know i believe strongly in the value of team you know if you if you have a cohesive team unit you're going to be greater than some of your parts and if you don't you can have great individuals and you don't get anywhere so you've got it you've got to protect that and and obviously that was the sort of the the prelude to the the issue that i had with kp but i i think just generally you know try and integrate and incorporate difference in your team and if you do you're probably going to be a stronger team for that i'm fascinated i used to love we used to get new cricket bats every season uh and obviously the stars who had them kind of inspired what you bought i always remember like woodworm with kp um torch torch yeah god uh and my question to you i'm sorry for i always ask the really direct how does bat sponsorships work and how much do you get paid for a bat sponsorship he's just so focused on the money isn't he it's all about the pride of representing your country it's not about the money and endorsements no I mean someone sat in that chair and said oh yeah Gunter said he warned me about you yeah exactly love him on Drive to Survive so yeah bat sponsor I mean ultimately you get an endorsement deal with a bat sponsor but did three come to you and say you've got a grey nickels you've got you've got that's what your agent's for really so i mean i being the sort of pretty dull and predictable person that i was i stay with grey nickels all the way through my career and i think they went out their way to make sure that it was worth my while staying with them um and yeah so yeah i mean you get an endorsement deal you obviously get bonuses for scoring hundreds and blah blah blah so yeah so it's just like any other endorsement deal probably but like for okay so to take it away from you then because you know i don't want to be too sensitive like with like a kp and a woodworm to get like half a million quid for doing woodworm well i think back then maybe not quite as much as that but he maybe half of that i mean i'm really speculating yeah but um since then some of the bigger names in sport have come in so adidas came in new balance came in you know ben stokes is sponsored by red bull for instance on the back of his bat and um so i think the endorsement deals have probably got bigger over time but truthfully the great earning opportunities now are in the franchise tournament so you know if you can get an IPL gig or a big bash gig or you know there are loads of these franchise tournaments then you can really earn a lot of money you know you're probably doubling or maybe even tripling what you'd earn just if you're playing international cricket and so that's where the the guys at the moment have massive advantages over the guys in my day would you tell players today like make hay while the sun shines because it doesn't shine forever or would you say no focus performance is everything if you lose performance you're nothing well that's a tricky probably a bit of both i mean i i think be strategic about if you have the opportunity to play in some of these t20 tournaments be strategic about it i think try and do it but make sure you think about not burning out like managing your schedule is really important i think on the endorsement side like it's not like we're sort of emma raducanu and cartier and all these big brands are coming you asking you to do loads of photo shoots like you're lucky if you get two or three endorsement deals and if you do take them of course but also like when you were making some of those decisions brand wise it comes down it comes back to like the perception of the role that you played in the team you know if you're looking at it you don't have in football the center back wearing the pink nike vapors just as you probably wouldn't have had you opening the bat with a woodworm i just yeah there was that there's like a style and a kind of cultural piece to to these brands as well so that very much buys into it you know gray nickels you said you were boring stayed with it but that was very much you know that's the solid the traditional the great bat the correct cook the you so that was part of the brand value so you fit perfectly into that yeah that's true that is true um and then you yeah as you say the kps of this world went with woodworm um different different shape went very hard paid him a lot of money and didn't last for very long so you know those those sort of challenger brands come in um are those adidas and new balance bats as good like i i love again they're all made in india they're all made in the same factory really yeah No, because no, but if you get like your, I used to love Salix.

38:28I remember Salix. It's old school, yeah. Is it old school? They were quality. They were quality and they were beautifully made. And there's a craftsman like structure to that. It was like English. Yeah, no bats are made in England anymore. They're all made in India. Yeah, because they dry them out much more. So you get much bigger bat for the same weight. And you just can't dry them out in the same way in the UK. Wow. we've um oh god rachel reeves you've lost the cricket bat there we go it's another one other industry that's ruined mind you you still need english willow and by the way there's a big shortage of english willow so if you're looking to invest it's not a bad place so the price of bats yeah i mean i remember how much is it i mean it can go up to a thousand pounds yeah thousand quid yeah for the top i mean somewhere between 500 and a thousand pounds moving moving production to India would be able to lower the cost.

39:23Again, scarcity of product. Yeah. Whoa, which brand is£1 ,000? Well, if you look at the top bats from a lot of the brands, I mean, I think£1 ,000 is probably right. I think Grey Nichols offers one where you go down to the factory and you pick it out and you might have Alistair Cook there. You know what I mean? But, yeah, I mean, in my day, it was about£100 a bat. Now it's definitely£450,£500 plus, yeah. Wow. Massive inflation. I think, again, there's been a big shortage in English willow and obviously huge uptake in terms of the number of people playing the game, especially in India. And in India, they used to use sort of cheaper Kashmiri willow bats.

40:05But of course, just like you've got the sort of increasing middle class in India, you've got a lot of people that want better bats. Which side did you hate playing against? Yeah, I mean, I think in terms of touring, Bangladesh and Pakistan would be the hardest. yeah i mean it's very hard to get out the hotel there's not much to do um you know sometimes you're going to some pretty poor under underdeveloped places and um and you're a long way away from home like so i think they were the tough tours i only toured pakistan once and that was right back in 2005 just so you know if you think about the sort of what happened after 9-11 and the sort of war on terror and it was actually a really quite a scary place to go back then and then of course shortly after they had that massive terrorist attack with the Sri Lankan cricket team and so no one played cricket in Pakistan for quite a long time after that I think it's obviously very different there now and Bangladesh was I think just relatively very undeveloped so India back in the 70s and 80s was probably a bit more like Bangladesh in the early 2000s india now is a great place to go fantastic hotels brilliant food you're not getting sick all the time new stadiums phenomenal place to go india incredible energy you know part of the world you just feel is flying um and it's cricket is the only language that anyone talks out there and so it's an amazing place to play cricket right let's go executive move into that side of it for you I can say it because you're too modest to do it but when you kind of took that director of cricket position like you really from my view and I'm sure a lot of other people hold it kicked off a completely different cycle of success for us as a country across multi formats and what I mean by that is you brought a real focus into white ball you created a really nice leadership model in there and it may not be a stretch to say that that set a lot of the foundations for how we're also now playing our test match cricket so and you can disagree or disagree with that but when you came in when you took that job how did you approach it where did you see the game in the country at that time and where you wanted it to go yeah well i just i was brought in after the 2015 world cup where we another horrendous failure in a world cup for us we got bungled out by bangladesh if you remember in in um australia and i was just sick and tired of us repeating the same mistakes in white ball cricket playing sort of hesitant sort of uh i suppose antiquated version of the game when everyone else was playing it differently.

42:38I hated the fact that we didn't really care about white ball cricket and it was all about test cricket for us. And I just saw it was just such an obvious route for us to really turn white ball cricket on its head in this country. And so one of the first things we did is say, look, we've got to break some barriers here in our white ball cricket. There are all these sort of preconceived notions of what a good score is in 50 over cricket. Let's just throw that all out the window and let's see how far we can go. Usually 300 is a good score. And we said, who says that? Why can't we score 10 and over?

43:13And so for that first series against New Zealand, I think we got over 400 in one game. We got bundled out for 340 overs. But it was this whole sort of concept of let's break new ground. Let's do something pioneering. Let's move the game forward. And it's amazing how motivating that is for players to kind of feel like they're at the cutting edge of a new wave. So it's about playing wide ball cricket in a new way, being at the forefront of whatever changes are going to be made. And then making sure you have the sort of coaching team and the captain to sort of role model that. And secondly, I felt very strongly that we'd always kind of had this ridiculous notion that your best players, your best players in all formats.

43:57And I was like, well, hold on, we should have test specialists and we should have white ball specialists and the skill sets are massively different. So let's not be shy about saying to some players, you're a white ball specialist. Go and play as much white ball cricket around the world as you can, gain that experience and then come back and win a World Cup. So that was the sort of general philosophy we had around let's win a World Cup for the first time. In 2019 in England, we've got this opportunity that we'll never come back to do it on our home shore. And luckily, we sort of, we were able to go and do that.

44:30So it was an incredible, you know, for me, running elite cricket, it's a very different thing to running a team because you've got a whole department that you've got to bring together. It's not just about 11 players. And you need to manage upwards with the ECB hierarchy as well. So it was my first sort of experience of being in a bit more of a corporate environment. But I still had a lot of control over our sort of section within that. It was an amazing experience. I loved every moment of it. Did it create friction with the test match game when you started to implement that? Truthfully, it was the early days was more going up to the likes of Broad and Anderson saying, we're not going to pick you in white ball cricket.

45:10You're a test specialist from now on. They didn't like that. And likewise, back then, it was saying to people like Joss Butler, we see you as white ball specialist, not test specialist. Subsequently, he did come back into the test match arena. so I think the you know Alistair Cook was captaining the test team I think he was relatively comfortable with that he obviously didn't have ambitions of playing in white ball cricket anymore I think when you look at where we are now it's very different because actually it's all come back together again rightly or wrongly I'm still not convinced it's the right option personally but what we are doing is we're obviously using far more of those white ball skills in the test match environment and playing a much higher tempo test match game so that was what i meant when i loosely said that you know a lot of those moves may have influenced that i know they hate the term but everyone understands that the basball style cricket that we see now in a test match which is so different to how test match cricket has been played and obviously therefore generates a lot of this conversation but does it you know it feeds into how players now are developing because not only do you have maybe fewer specialists but you also have the money now so focused as we talked about towards those franchises the shorter form game so if you're told you're going to be a test match player by your country and we're not going to play you in white ball yeah you're now maybe you know that's costing them an opportunity to potentially go and show their skills to then go and get a franchise slot somewhere else so i'd imagine that's a harder a bit for them to balance now as well yeah and as you say i mean in this day and age we're not doing it quite so much but i would argue that the difficulty with having your your best players playing all formats and franchise tournaments away is you can't prioritize everything at the same time so something's going to fall by the wayside if you look at our test teams got been very competitive they've had some great victories but our white ball success has fallen on the way because a lot of the focus in recent times has been on the test match at the expense of the white ball team so that's why if you have specialists you can equally focus on each format at the same time but what's tricky is currently our best white ball players are probably our best test match players because of the way we're playing test cricket so that's a hard one for selectors you know are you going to pick a less good team to rest some players and no one really wants to do that what do you think about brendan being coach across formats then because that obviously brings it much closer together than it would be otherwise well again i i sort of got to the the view the back end of my time that it was too big a job for one person to do all formats all the time you sort of sleepwalking from one format into another or from one tour to another um so logically having different coaches for different formats makes sense but practically there are challenges with it because then you do have that sort of thing of one coach going well why are you wrestling players from this format i want them in this and so there's some practical issues with it but i think just if you look at it logically and unemotionally it's a it's a sort of smarter way to go i think i love test cricket but if you look 20 years out and you also just look at consumer attention spans and the distribution platforms in which we consume a lot of content do you think test match cricket will still be a relevant sporting medium yeah i do but it'll be different you know i i quite like that analogy of test crickets like classical music and short form crickets like pop music so pop music it's a bigger market more people interested in it if you really want to make big money that's where you go but classical music has a very passionate smaller supporter base that are going to just follow it come hell or high water and that's test cricket and i think the big series the ashes series uh england india australia india those three series still managed to sort of gain traction um and i think that'll continue to be what what smart sports administrators will do is say like we need to limit the amount of test cricket we play and so it's quality not quantity um but we don't necessarily have smart sports do we have sustainability of county cricket you mentioned like the 80 to 100k i mean it's not a huge amount of money i think the average county salary is 40 grand and that's been the same for 20 years 40 grand there's no sustainability in county cricket no i mean it's madness we got we got 450 professional cricketers in this country if we had 200 we would have no it would be a performance improvement rather than a step back you know we've got too many counties with too many professional cricketers like it it doesn't make sense but it's obviously an antiquated system why didn't we get rid of them because the governance model makes it very difficult to do so um and and also there's a lot of passionate support for count i mean not a lot of it but they're the supporters that there are for county cricket are very passionate about it but if there were enough then it would be sustainable there's not enough money i mean no no one makes any money out of county cricket so ultimately it's subsidized through both the hundred and england cricket but just so i get it so you would say hey we should have much fewer eight teams and have them play less frequently like what would you do to County if I gave you a magic wand?

50:50Well, I got engaged to do a high-performance review into English cricket a couple of years ago, so I suggest you read that. But we were effectively trying to... I loved it, but I'm more thinking for people that didn't read it. Yeah, no, thank you. My favourite was the middle. What was your favourite bit? Thank you, mate. What bit in particular did you really like? I don't want to give it away for anyone that hasn't. But, I mean, we were challenging the game to play less four-day cricket, So going from 14 championship games down to 10, have a sort of a super elite first division of six teams. But, you know, truthfully, that was very much with a, if we do this, if we structure the game differently in this country, it's going to give England a far better chance of being the best team across all formats.

51:38And actually, if you look at our performance over 40 years, we've been a mediocre cricket team relative to Australia back in the day, the West Indies, South Africa, we've been very mediocre. So the driver was, if we really want England to be successful, this is what we should do. And obviously, we ruffled a few too many feathers and the county game didn't like some of the suggestions we had. And that's okay. But ultimately, there's no point in trying to keep everyone happy and doing nothing that actually moves the needle. Do you think the 100 investments that we've just seen will automatically shake that up regardless because what you have now is you have shareholders basically in a county system which they haven't had before who have paid a lot of money that's external expectation has now become internal expectation and they can't just sit back and let things happen these are proper businesses now investing in this and so the demands on the counties to improve and be better at everything they do will naturally increase and that will start to shift correct and i think that the host venues the eight host venues have got such an inbuilt advantage in this next phase so i think you're going to get the emergence of sort of eight super counties and probably the 10 underneath um it's actually 11 with the mcc that they will they will end up being feeder counties through but the governance model makes it very hard for radical changes to to happen and so i think this happens over time via osmosis and certainly the the private investors i know because i've sort of spoken to a lot of them they're they're very ambitious they've bought a seat at the table the future of english cricket and they want to see quite radical change and so it's going to be confronting for the game we've spoken about this previously but my concern with it is that yes it's brilliant that all of this money now is going to be distributed amongst counties and there is more money in the game and the ECB have done a great job at creating an environment to allow that investment to happen but it's not about the money being there it's about how it's spent Yeah, absolutely.

53:35And I still think there's that mindset. All that money's been allocated to the counties and the counties will have to think individually about how they spend that money. And there's a lot of debt in the game of cricket that probably needs to be eradicated. And then counties will still have ambitions of playing in the first division. And so there's always a danger that a lot of that goes into players' wages over time in an unsustainable way. I mean my view is what the ECB should have done is create a sort of endowment fund for the future of the game ensure that we're not having this situation in four or five years time where you're knocking on Sky's door going please fund the next five years of English cricket at a time where Sky you know we know the the challenges for the sort of the broadcast market so you know I feel like the danger is you're sort of you've got this big windfall for the game 500 million quid plus and it all sort of gets dissipated away and bearing in mind of course that we all focus on the top end of sport but the real juicy stuff is at the bottom end you know the more people you get playing sport in the first place the healthier the sport's going to be you can have this big flow through of super fans because they played sport young they're going to play and support and go and watch and buy equipment and all that sort of stuff so you know we always you know there's a lot of focus on teams and leagues and investment opportunities but i still think the big opportunity is get more people playing a particular sport and over time that's going to feed through to the top end as well do you think the broadcast market looks like in 10 years time it's it's hard to say i mean obviously there's been a period of time where you've had sky and tnt and all that sort of stuff we've been paying the big broadcast rights um we've obviously got the rise of the streamers now who are getting more interested in sport, but their business model is very different.

55:27I mean, when you look at it mainly, mainly what you'll see is that the super prime assets are still going up, but a lot of the other assets are going downwards now. So I think that business model that's basically been based on, I sit down, do my broadcast deal every five years, and next time around, I'm going to get paid 20 or 30 % or 50 % or 100 % more. I don't think that's going to happen anymore and so sports administrators are going to have to work much harder in terms of getting other revenue into their sports did you through your work now uh did you have a look at any of the hundred the franchises you know the valuations attached to it how we've been looking at these as appreciating assets in the sport yeah yeah so i mean ttb sport capital that i'm involved with which is really a sort of sports investment platform we did have a look at it we were we were working with a client that was looking at it i mean it truthfully and this is the problem with sport if you look at it from a sort of fundamental valuation point it was nuts that the the prices that these things went for were just defies all logic but of course you know sport is not a logical thing it's an emotional thing and for a lot of people it's a trophy asset and for some of the IPL teams as part of a broader multi-club sort of global strategy.