The Plan: How Fletcher and Flower Transformed English Cricket. By Steve James.

English cricket

Bushcraft

Immigrants to the rescue

Jul 21st 2012 | from the print edition

I came, I coached, I conquered

The Plan: How Fletcher and Flower Transformed English Cricket. By Steve James. Bantam Press; 357 pages; £20. Buy from Amazon.co.uk

IN 1999 the English Test cricket team was ranked the worst in the world. Introducing reforms, the England and Wales Cricket Board set itself the target of making England the world’s best Test team by 2007. England did win a memorable Ashes series against Australia in 2005, but by 2007 they had not made it to the top. Four years later they succeeded. Followers of English cricket, worn down by three decades of defeat, are still pinching themselves.

Steve James’s new book, “The Plan”, shows that Mr Flower cares as much about losing a game of touch football as losing a Test match. Mr Fletcher, as coach of Glamorgan’s county team, was contemptuous of English professional players who turned up early on a match day and drank tea, instead of honing their skills in the outfield. Both played cricket for Zimbabwe before emigrating. Mr Fletcher left for South Africa when the local hospital did not have a safety pin for the sling to support his dislocated shoulder. Mr Flower made a more dramatic exit as a political refugee: while playing for Zimbabwe in an international tournament, he wore a black armband to protest against hunger, unemployment and oppression.England imported coaches from Zimbabwe. Duncan Fletcher and Andrew Flower (pictured) are different from the English. Grant Flower, Andrew’s brother, explains why: “Zimbabweans take chances. They have had a civil war to deal with, and a lot of people had trouble on their farms. If you’re weak, you get singled out, and you don’t survive.”

Mr James, a former county cricketer who played a couple of times for England, says that, despite having so much in common, the two men are not friends. This is a fine detail in a persuasive account of the renaissance of English cricket, and no one is better qualified to tell it. Mr James was captain of Glamorgan when Mr Fletcher coached the team, and as a young player he spent winters in Zimbabwe where he discovered Mr Flower to be a kindred spirit. As a journalist for the Sunday Telegraph, he has become a member of an influential new British school of cricket writing. Formed of former players such as Mike Atherton (Times), Mike Selvey (Guardian) and Derek Pringle (Daily Telegraph), it is a startling innovation—as if the theatre critics of the major broadsheet papers had given us their Hamlets and King Lears before turning to the arts pages. Earlier generations of cricket journalists were principally match reporters, but the growing domination of television has increased the demand for sophisticated analysis of tactics, techniques and personalities.

Mr James judges Mr Fletcher to have been the better coach and Mr Flower the better manager. Unlike Mr Flower, Mr Fletcher was not universally liked by the team (Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison were notable dissidents). His England career ended in failure; and, perhaps because of his grumpy manner and a bad-tempered autobiography (ghosted by Mr James), he was not greatly mourned. In 2011, when Mr Flower’s England team met India, whose coach Mr Fletcher had become, Mr Flower’s team humbled them to go top of the rankings. But the two men rightly have equal shares in the credit. Mr James suggests that Mr Flower will quit in a couple of years, and his candidate for the succession is England’s fielding coach, Richard Halsall. One special qualification is that he is a Zimbabwean.