Andrew should have noted that all England coaching careers have to end in failure.
Australian coaches end because of getting sick of all that tiresome success.
England needs to get any recently retired Australian cricketer. Steve Waugh? He could probably play and coach actually….

Yup.. the first time I read the piece (can’t remember who wrote it though) I thought it was a bit of a sweeping statement. Anyway, who wasn’t surprised at Fletcher’s resignation? You’d have to be buried 6 feet underground - or live in America, maybe - to not be surprised.
Lots of coaches and all that seem to retire after the World Cup, that this is the one GOAL they’ve been striving for (though not England, though, heh). Does this happen all the time? Did a whole legion of coaches and players retire after the 2001 WC? I admit, during the last World Cup I was still a snotty-nosed teenager completely uninterested (not disinterested) in cricket.

The viciousness with which the English treat the defeated continues to sicken me — and the calls for bloodletting and sacking smack of scapegoatism, particularly when calls are being made by former players/captains who did no better in the World Cup. Personally, I don’t give a flying one about the World Cup anyway. The All Blacks are usually the best rugby team in the world but they always crap out in the Rugby World Cup (except for the once, when they were captained by David Kirk, who is now chief executive of Fairfax Media, the Australian media company which owns half New Zealand’s newspapers and is right now stripping half the staff out of them — so maybe they won under him because he was a tough, smart nasty shit). And the shit always hits the fan and all the management get sacked and it makes no bloody difference.

As for all this crap about planning right now for the World Cup in four years time — how ridiculous. You could pick whoever you liked right now to be your brave new team for 2011 but to guarantee that squad’s form, fitness and availability four years’ in the future would require more prescience than the Almighty possesses. It’s nonsense talk.

Well done, Duncan Fletcher. Thanks for everything. You didn’t serve the crap and abuse you got. And if they sack Michael Vaughan, then English cricket can go fuck itself, because I won’t be following it anymore. There’s no way I trust the judgment of the numerous pundits who pontificate about the captaincy when they’re the very ones who thought it was a smart idea to appoint Flintoff for the Ashes when any fool could see what a stupid idea that was. And I don’t say that in hindsight — I was saying it way before the series started.

Vaughan hasn’t been given the chance to find his form after being out of the game for a year. He’s the best leader they’ve got. Appointing Collingwood would just be another case of fucking up your best allrounder (and he is now the best allrounder, rather than Flintoff whose form is just as much a concern as Vaughan’s) and Strauss isn’t exactly in form either. The England side started getting their shit back together when Vaughan was returned to the captaincy and they never would have made the CB series final if it wasn’t for his skilled handling of the crucial game that knocked NZ out. As for his form, he’s not the only one who performed on the poor side during the World Cup. There’s a whole list of them. The team went into their shell. You can’t just blame one or two players.

AgainsttheWall — I agree, the whole handling of Freddie was a complete mess that the England management have definitely bent over backwards to extricate themselves from this year. Last year it was patently obvious that Strauss was having some success and could be the brain to lead the Freddie brawn in Vaughan’s absence, but I got the feeling that the management were so scared of “upsetting” their national hero Freddie that they made the wrong decision. And what a balls-up has transpired from that decision. I’m not at all convinced that the Ashes debacle should be laid at Fletcher’s feet. It’s not as if Monty would have turned the whole series round as the Fletcher critics would have us believe. I think the team were demoralised from a year of upheaval — four different captains, a raw bowling line-up, players just back from injury (and not just Giles — FLintoff as well) — you would have had to have been a magician, not just a coach, to fix that lot.

Fletcher gave me one of the greatest days of my life (12th September 2005) I’m truly grateful.

As for a successor - looks like Peter Moores is going to get the ECB nod. No real problem with that, but it does mean that Kevin Shine is more likely to keep his job, and he’s been atrocious as bowling coach. A new man coming in from outside like Moody would want to pick his own backroom staff.

Nick —— yeah, letting Cooley go was one big screw-up by the ECB. They should have given him anything he wanted. And all he wanted was a two-year contract, wasn’t it?

Kathy.You seem to get it right most of the time.
Was there any point in going to university?
Anyway, I’ve been out of commission for a while but the answer to your question [put it on Geraint Jones-should he resign or something sight]is:-
Laura Nyro album ‘Christmas and the Beads of Sweat’.
Track ‘Blackpatch’.Worth searching out along with her others.Just a play on the words ‘party’ and ‘Jones’.
Anyway, it’s not just the interminable keeper spot but everyone from 1 to 11 plus captaincy that needs deep thought as always.