Facing up: Andrew Strauss

You were quite a late starter, weren’t you? If someone had said to you at 22 that you were going to play 100 Test matches, what would you have thought? Even 50? Even one?

If you came to me at 19, I would have literally laughed in your face, because I didn’t have a county contract, I was playing for Oxfordshire Under-19s; England seemed like a million miles off. At Durham University, I was seen as a bit of a comedy figure because I’d do stupid things, I’d run myself out or something. Suddenly the penny dropped, and if I wanted to play cricket professionally, I had to get myself fit. By 22, I was getting into the Middlesex 1st XI, I was starting to play with Mark Ramprakash and Justin Langer. I was just a sponge, talking to them all the time, I was watching them in the nets, against certain bowling, and some of that permeated through into my technique as a result.

But the truth is, I never thought I was all that good. I was always a bit of a grafter, and I found a method that worked in county cricket, and I felt like I was quite a good learner. Each season I got a bit better, and learnt my game. But even in that Middlesex side, someone like Owais Shah was a million times a better hitter of the ball than I was, but maybe he didn’t learn in the same way that I did.

Back then, in county cricket it was seen as out of place to try too hard. It was a very comfortable environment, and if you were putting in the extra practice and you were getting really fit, people would say, “Well what’s this guy giving it, who does he think he is?” Many people just wanted an easy ride, they didn’t want to put themselves under pressure in terms of winning and losing games, they were happy to draw games, they were happy averaging 35 in a season to make sure they got their next contract, and that is just so far away from what international cricket is about.

It’s much better now but I still think county cricket lags a fair way behind international cricket in terms of professionalism. Langer had a massive mentoring role for me. At that time, he was trying to get back into the Australia side and he was pushing himself to the absolute limits – there was Langer who was on one end of the spectrum, Ramprakash slightly behind him, and there was just daylight between them and everyone else in terms of their professionalism, and I knew I needed to follow them.

I’m unbelievably competitive. I hate losing, and I don’t like the idea of other people, either in other teams or in my team, being better than me. I kind of feel like I should challenge myself to be as good as I can be, so I think that was the driver for me. 

You had plenty of encounters with Shane Warne. Is he the best bowler that’s ever lived? 

I think the package: the quality of bowling, the charisma, the showman, the poker player. I struggle to think of a better cricketer, or certainly a bowling cricketer. Murali was obviously incredibly hard to face in his own way, but he just didn’t have the intimidation factor that Warne had. It wasn’t just how he bowled; it was how he was on the field. In the first match of that 2005 series at Lord’s, we bowled Australia out quite cheaply, and Marcus Trescothick and I went out to bat, and as we were walking past Warne, he said, “Alright Daryll, how you feeling today mate?” and then the next over he walks past and said, “You seeing it alright today Daryll?” and he kept saying Daryll, Daryll, Daryll and I was so confused as to why he was calling me Daryll. And then, it suddenly twigged to me that he was referring to Daryll Cullinan, the South Africa batsman who never got more than 10 runs against him and was basically his bunny. Warney was planting in my head that I was going to be his bunny for the series. He wasn’t the sort of guy that was f-ing and blinding, he was a very smart sledger.

^{Strauss with Trevor Bayliss, England coach from 2015 to 2019}

In the fourth Test where we were chasing 129 to win, he got Trescothick out first ball, and the match was in the balance. And he just stopped the whole game halfway through an over and said, “Straussy, just want to let you know mate, I’m getting you out this ball OK? So, this ball, I’m getting you out.” And he said it in front of everyone, he said it in front of the umpires and made a massive song and dance about it, and I’m at the other end, and my initial instinct is, “Right, well screw you, I’m going to slog sweep you for six here, just to throw it back at you.” And then I thought, “No I can’t do that, that’s what he wants me to do, I’m going to defend it”, and then I’m thinking, “No what am I doing, he’s got in my head here!” It took me away from just watching the ball, to thinking a million different things. I blocked out that ball but shortly afterwards I did get out to him. He was a genius. 

In 2009 when you took over the captaincy, England were in a pretty bad place from all the things that had gone on previously. What did you do to change everything?

The team was quite divided, we obviously had the Pietersen/Moores thing. We had to bring people back together. The big thing that I tried to embed was this whole idea of taking personal responsibility. We had got too coach-led, it was too much about the coaches, not enough about the players. We needed to feel like it was our team and use the coaches as consultants. Also we had to play cricket without fear, we had to show that we weren’t fearful, and one way to demonstrate that I felt was by getting rid of nightwatchmen. We nearly had an open revolt in the team with that idea, so that one went out the window pretty quickly. 

You had a famous quote: “Don’t treat the team like a hire car.”

This was our team; this was our car that we had to nurture and take care of and keep clean. Players had become quite selfish and reliant on the coaches. We had to change that. We were lucky as we had some really good senior players who helped me with that – Matt Prior was brilliant, Alastair Cook... Paul Collingwood was just fantastic. 

When you were building the team to win the Ashes in Australia how important was that camp in Germany? 

It was vital. We knew how tough it was going to be to win in Australia. We needed to be resilient and we needed to push ourselves to see how far we could go. The first afternoon we were given these bricks, we had to carry them around for four or five hours through the forest without ever putting them down – it was horrendous. The real golddust was towards the end of that when they had beaten us down to within an inch of our lives, and we were sleep deprived and just feeling awful, we were sitting round a campfire, and Mark Bawden, the team psychologist, started introducing a conversation around, “share what drives you, who are you playing for” and so on.

Because everyone was so tired they started letting their guard down, and people started saying, “Actually I’m not very confident, I pretend I am, I’m not” or “I worry a huge amount about my place in this team and whether I’m good enough” or “I’m doing this for my family rather than myself”, things like that. We’d never heard this stuff from the players before, and what we were actually doing was being vulnerable to each other and as a result, it just brought us so much closer together and that particular tour, we were incredibly tight and close, and we’d built up this amazing resilience. 

^{The notorious Bavarian bootcamp}

In the planning for that 2010/11 Ashes series win, you consulted with lots of the players throughout that previous season, didn’t you?

I took them all out for dinner in groups of three or four, because I think what tends to happen in international cricket is you’re always focused on the series you’re playing and then you arrive at the next destination and you are like “onto this one now”. We knew that in that Ashes series, we had to be ahead of the game, and we had to be putting in a lot of thought not just into what was going to happen on the cricket field, but how we were going to deal with sledging and crowd interference. We had to understand what we were going to do to get away from our bubble when we were not playing. How we were going to make life as easy as possible for us, and then obviously there was the on-field stuff as well. I do think, on reflection, that did work for us – it just got people’s heads in that space a bit earlier than they would have been otherwise. 

Is there anything from what you did on that tour that you would like to pass on to Joe Root, about the structure of that plan regarding regaining the Ashes next winter?

Not really. Our tactics in Australia worked really well. We were very negative in the way we bowled. We tried to bowl maidens and build pressure and we thought that would play well against that ultra-aggressive, attacking Australian style, and we had the bowlers to deliver that in Broad, Anderson, Bresnan, Tremlett and Swann. But one of the most dangerous things you ever do in sport is fall in love with your wins. You win doing it one way and therefore you think you can repeat that.

Sport isn’t like that. Sport is dynamic in nature; nothing is ever the same. It’s always shifting and changing and moving and so, the best teams are actually the ones that are the most adaptable. They have a gameplan, a way of playing, a philosophy, but they encourage players to think on the spot. I think that is the only way to get consistency in high-level sport. There are so many things out there that you can’t control, that you have to trust and challenge the players every day, to think for themselves. The 2019 World Cup was a great example of that. Incredible, huge pressure, strange environment that no one had been in before, you can’t plan for that.

You’ve got to have players that can think on their feet and deliver if you’re going to win those sorts of circumstances and matches. Our players going to play in the IPL is a brilliant way to encourage that. Effectively they’re going over there as overseas players, huge pressure on them, big audiences, having to deliver in foreign situations and circumstances. That’s encouraging them to think for themselves, without a massive team of support staff and analysts and staff from the England environment behind them. 

Having won the Ashes in Australia, plus getting England to No.1 Test team, you then became England’s director of cricket in 2015. What flipped you into thinking the 2019 World Cup was key? 

I just felt like we were missing the cricketing train. The momentum in cricket was all white-ball around the world, mainly T20 cricket but also 50-over cricket, and I always felt like we valued Test cricket because we love the tradition of it, but we also value it because we were never any good at white-ball cricket, so it was that thing that separated us from the other teams. I felt like the way the game was moving, we had to move with the times, and we had to set the ambition to be world’s best in both red-ball and white-ball cricket.

^{With Shane Warne, helping the Ruth Strauss Foundation day during the 2019 Lord’s Ashes Test}

Plus of course the World Cup being in England was a massive driver as well. When we look now with the introduction of The Hundred, and all these domestic T20 competitions, our players are coveted – everyone wants our players to play for them! Which is a brilliant place for us to be. The improvement we’ve made in such a short time is extraordinary – it shows we always had it there, we just didn’t have the right philosophy.

How did you change that philosophy? 

I had been in two World Cups where we had been horrendously poor. And in 2015 we were playing a different game to virtually everyone else. I got Nathan Leamon [England analyst] to do some analysis on past World Cup winners. It revealed two things. No.1: no team that hadn’t been in the top three ODI sides had won it. And second, the top seven in your batting order must have great strike-rates and averages. We felt like if we could be the best batting team in the world come the World Cup, then we would have a good chance of winning it. It’s all about confidence, and you can’t just drum up that from anywhere, it comes from winning consistently, so we always felt like the 18 months leading up to the World Cup was going to be massive.

We tracked our progress in a number of different areas – sometimes it was around direct hits from the fielders, number of sixes hit, scores in the last 10 overs etc. Every 12-month period, we had three or four priorities that we were working on. I had a big dashboard that I kept, and the analyst after every series would put together a summary of where we were, but a lot of that wasn’t in front of the players. You’ve got to be careful with stats. A lot of the time it can confuse and complicate and the truth is, you want the players to think the game is simple. For me, that whole philosophy, at the start of the four-year programme was, “Let’s just remove any pre-conceived expectations of what’s a good score in 50-over cricket, and see what happens”. Suddenly the team was scoring 400 and 450, so the players just knew that they should just go out and attack and if they saw an opportunity, just go with it 100 per cent. And if they failed, that wasn’t a problem – what was more of a problem was not going with it, so it was just judging them on other things as opposed to just the runs and wickets.

'It was seen as out of place to try too hard in county cricket 20 years ago. Players were happy to draw games, they were happy averaging 35 to get their next contract'

I wanted it to be about the players thinking for themselves, so I wanted a coach that: a) was going to be calm in the dressing room and supportive; but b) be one who had a very strong white-ball record. And so Trevor Bayliss ticked all those boxes. In some ways I was surprised by just how quiet he ended up being, I thought that over time he would take on a bit more. With leadership, there is never a vacuum. So, if the coach isn’t playing the strong leadership position, someone else will, and in this case, it was Eoin Morgan and that was a really healthy environment where the captain was playing a strong leadership position, the coach was supporting him alongside the other support staff.

Was the rest and rotation policy partly to blame for England losing 3-1 in India?

No. You need to look at the intent of rest and rotation, looking after the players wellbeing. I was in the bubble for a week last summer and it was an absolute nightmare. You can’t last long like that. The intent is right. If you take certain decisions [to give players rest] you’ll have them all wanting to go back at the same time. It had no effect on the outcome of the series but it is hard to manage and gives people a stick to beat you with. India are a very good side especially at home and they exposed England’s frailties relentlessly and showed their superiority.

What jobs do you have now? 

As a consultant I offer a bit of advice to Ashley Giles and Tom Harrison around anything to do with high-performance stuff. And to Ed Smith, the chief selector too, but it’s very much background advice. Then I’m chairman of the ECB cricket committee, which oversees all performance cricket in this country, so that’s men’s cricket, universities, women’s cricket, disabilities cricket, it’s the pathway. The pathways are really interesting in all sport, around how early should people be specialising, should they be playing other sports, are we drilling the right things into people at the right age.

I’ve also got a high-performance psychology business, coaching high performance with individuals and teams in the corporate environment. It’s called Mindflick and I work with two performance psychologists, and I’m really enjoying the challenge of trying to learn how to navigate your way through the business environment rather than a sporting one. There’s also the Ruth Strauss Foundation, of course, which we set up 18 months or so ago, on the back of Ruth’s death. Trying to create a worthwhile legacy for her name by funding research into these rare forms of lung cancer and supporting families when facing the death of a parent, and unfortunately, far too many kids have to go through that. I’m very proud of what we’ve done so far in that field.

This article was published in the April edition of The Cricketer - the home of the best cricket analysis and commentary, covering the international, county, women's and amateur game