The former England captain Andrew Strauss had few words to say regarding the future of cricket and how cricket is evolving. The ex-captain said that “The cricket world around us is changing unbelievably quickly. Every day, every week, every month, we’re seeing a new example of how that world is changing.”
Strauss has sent out a serious message for the management of England and Wales’s cricket board saying “we can’t afford to be slow-moving and have our heads in the sand.”
He even talks about how the media is switching their focus more towards the shorter formats of the game, Test matches use to get a lot of attention but now a day it is slowly fading away.
Strauss former England Captain comment:
“We’re having to ask ourselves in this country, where does our game fit into that? We need to make sure that we have incentives there for our players to play both red- and white-ball cricket. Of course, the ECB have put a lot of time and attention and effort into giving the Hundred the potential to be a global short-form event that matches any of these other leagues.”
“One of the things that we need to be conscious of in the game in this country is we have to be nimble and adaptable. And we can’t afford to be slow-moving and have our heads in the sand. That’s really important that we set the game up in a way that allows us to be flexible because ultimately players, if they’ve got many opportunities, will always look at those opportunities side by side and decide what’s best for them.”
He further added that “It’s early days and there are still a lot of areas of improvement,” Strauss, said of the Test team’s upturned fortunes under the captaincy of Ben Stokes and with Brendon McCullum as coach. “It’s just brilliant to see players playing with a smile on their face, enjoying the challenge, not worried so much about what might go wrong.”
“They’re more excited about doing things that haven’t been done before – pioneering, changing the face of the game or however you want to describe it. The more you have that mind-set in the dressing room the more confidence builds, the more you are able to do extraordinary things. We saw it with the white-ball team post-2015 and we’re going to see it again with this Test team.”
Andrew Strauss who was England’s director of cricket for three years, concluded by saying “I still maintain they can sit together comfortably, Test cricket and T20 cricket. But the challenge we have is, can we produce a manageable schedule that allows players to do both? That is really complicated. It’s multidimensional. It’s like a big Rubik’s Cube.” Source- (The Guardian)
England is ready to come back this month for the three-match test series against South Africa, but not sure regarding the future of test cricket, as the game is evolving will the T20 leagues take over? We will have to see what will happen to the longest format of the game in the near future.
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