Is It Now Time For Multiple Coaches?

Tim Wigmore believes Trevor Bayliss should now focus his attentions on his main aim – to lift the 2019 World Cup

 In 2015, after a particularly calamitous World Cup campaign, England hired Trevor Bayliss as head coach.The rationale was simple: England had had an abominable record in one-day international cricket since reaching the 1992 World Cup final. It was time to take white ball cricket seriously, and genuinely put it on a par with Test cricket.

To do so, England needed a head coach who excelled in limited overs cricket. Bayliss had done so with Sri Lanka, in Australian domestic cricket and in the Indian Premier League. His mere appointment was a potent symbol that, finally, England respected limited overs cricket, and had shed their peculiar snobbery that the shorter formats were less significant than Test matches. And it was a sign that England were prepared to do whatever it took to win the 2019 World Cup, which would be held in England, and was viewed by director of England cricket Andrew Strauss and ECB chief executive Tom Harrison as a rare opportunity to galvanise the sport at home and win over the public.

So far, so good. Nearing three years after Bayliss’s appointment, no one sniggers at the notion of England lifting their first ever World Cup in 2019. In both ODI and T20 cricket, England’s batsmen are at the forefront of the revolution: a world of scores getting ever higher, balls being hit harder and shots getting ever more audacious. Norms in limited overs cricket have been recalibrated, and England, who approach ODIs expecting to score 400, are the emblem of this new age.