Andrew Strauss has recruited Sir David Brailsford, former performance director of British Cycling and current sporting director of Ineos, for his high-performance trial of English cricket. Dan Ashworth, the former director of elite development at the Football Association, has also been hired as Strauss looks to push England’s men’s teams to the top of the rankings in every format.
Strauss chairs the England and Wales Cricket Board’s Performance Cricket Committee, which conducts research before presenting a proposed path to global dominance in time for a necessary restructuring of the national calendar, due to be voted on this year and implemented in 2023.
In addition to a number of figures within the game, the committee has reached out to notable figures in other sports. Brailsford and Ashworth are the standout names and are also managed by Kate Baker, the head of performance at UK Sport, Penny Hughes, former chairman of Aston Martin, and Simon Timson, who once ran the English cricket development programme Lawn Tennis Association and British Skeleton and is currently Performance Director at Manchester City.
“We’ve never had a group of England men’s teams that are the best in the world in all formats at the same time, so anything we’ve done in the past hasn’t gotten us where we want to be,” Strauss wrote on the website of the ECB and vowed to “look outward to see what we can learn from other sports and be curious about what has worked well elsewhere”.
“Once we have identified a set of high-performance principles, we will use them, along with independent analysis and data, and develop a set of options for discussion with the wider public over the summer,” Strauss added. “I am keen to achieve a situation where solid proposals are voted on in September to give counties and the English setup time to prepare for the 2023 season and beyond.”
One thing the committee won’t seek to change is the international schedule, which England’s new Test captain Ben Stokes recently called “ridiculous” and “something that definitely needs to be looked at” on the grounds that it’s not fully under which the ECB stands for control.
Meanwhile, Derbyshire have signed 25-year-old Australian all-rounder Hayden Kerr to replace Sri Lankan seaman Suranga Lakmal, who is out for the season with an elbow injury. “Hayden meets our requirements,” said Mickey Arthur, Derbyshire head coach. “He’s a fast left-arm bowler who can bowl to the death and put a good hit on him with the bat.”
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