Peter Moores admits his future as England’s coach is out of his hands after his side’s humiliating first-round exit from the World Cup. He did, however, add that he is the right man for the job and says he is “desperate” to continue in the role he took on for the second time last April.
Desperate is about as accurate a description you could give for England’s World Cup, the team’s 15-run capitulation to Bangladesh at the Adelaide Oval the fourth defeat in five games and a result that means their campaign is over with a game to spare.
Moores was given the job in the cull that followed the Ashes whitewash in Australia. Now a man who lost four out of seven Test series in his first spell in charge of England between 2007 and 2009, appears on the brink in his second coming after adding this premature World Cup exit to a run that has seen him win just one series – the Tests against India last summer – out of six across all formats.
Asked if he felt he should be given more time, Moores said: “It’s certainly not my decision, I hope so. I want to carry on desperately, yes. I’m here to try and make a difference.”
Moores is scheduled to have a debrief in the coming days with his immediate boss Paul Downton, the managing director of England Cricket.
Downton’s own future looks tied to that of Moores given the staunch backing he has offered his coach since taking the job last year and the statement it made about Kevin Pietersen, sacked in the wake of that Ashes whitewash and the man who brought down Moores first time around after a bitter falling out which also saw the South African-born batsman stripped of the captaincy.
“The conversations I’ll have with him, it’s not for me to think about now, that’s something for the next few days and the future really,” said Moores. “We’ve just exited a World Cup so I’m not going to start looking at what conversations I’ll have with Paul.”
Moores did concede he understood why people might want him sacked. “Yes, because it goes with the territory,” he said.
“I’m not going to stand here and say we all shouldn’t take some responsibility – of course we should. I’m the coach, we have a set of players and everybody’s got to be a man about it and take the responsibility.
“I think at the moment people are going to be very upset – we’ve got a lot of passionate fans out there. They’re desperate for us to do well and we know that and we feel it. That makes you feel terrible as a person because you want to do better. There’s certainly areas to look at as a group, an organisation and players.”
Moores has an unfortunate turn of phrase that sometimes sees his audience – certainly in the media – switch off. One must assume the same can be said of his players.
Like many of his public addresses on this tour – and don’t forget England have been in Australia and New Zealand for two months now – Moores put his foot in his mouth once again on Monday.
One such clanger came in his TV interview when he cited the need to “look at the data” when analysing why his team were unable to chase down 276 against Bangladesh.
Given England have been accused of blinding their players with statistics during this campaign, it was an astonishing statement.
As was his assertion that “Five months isn’t that long in sport in some ways,” when trying to explain England’s failure despite an unprecedented period of preparation in one-day cricket heading into the World Cup thanks to the rescheduling of last winter’s Ashes series.
Most galling will be the 52-year-old’s lament that England did not have a “settled side” going into the tournament. Many observers will say they did given the same eleven played the entire Tri-Series that preceded the World Cup, with Moores’ decision to rejig the batting order to accommodate the last-minute inclusion of Gary Ballance one reason why the team was unsettled.
England’s decision to sack Alastair Cook as one-day captain just eight weeks before the tournament did not help matters either. Asked if in hindsight he should have discarded Cook much earlier to give Eoin Morgan, his successor, time to bed in, Moores said: “What has happened has happened. I don’t think that’s fundamental.”
Morgan, who scored his fifth duck in nine innings against Bangladesh, refused to state categorically whether he wanted to keep the one-day captaincy. Moores hardly gave the Irishman a ringing endorsement either, saying: “He’s going to be hurting so we’ll leave it to another time to look at that.”
