ECB looks at wide-ranging No 2 role, with Peter Moores front-runner for top job, though Trevor Bayliss impresses
England are lining up Sri Lanka’s World Twenty20 winning coach Paul Farbrace for a senior role within the new coaching set-up, which will be finalised over the next few days.
Farbrace has been interviewed this week by the England and Wales Cricket Board and is pondering a move back to England to be an assistant coach.
Peter Moores is the front-runner for the top job to replace Andy Flower, but Trevor Bayliss, the 51-year-old Australian, impressed ECB officials when they met in Dubai two weeks ago while he was preparing his Kolkata Knight Riders team for the Indian Premier League and is set for a second interview with Paul Downton, the managing director of the England team, via Skype on Good Friday.
Moores met with Downton on Wednesday to outline his vision for resurrecting England after the Ashes whitewash and has strong supporters within the higher echelons of the ECB, while Ashley Giles, who was also interviewed this week has been groomed for the top job for the past two years.
Mick Newell, of Nottinghamshire, Mark Robinson, of Sussex, have also been interviewed this week. Downton will make the final decision, which will then be rubber-stamped by the ECB’s executive board, chaired by Giles Clarke.
During Farbrace’s five months as head coach Sri Lanka won both the Asia Cup and the World Twenty20 in Bangladesh. He is also due to lead them on their tour to England next month.
Farbrace, 46, who played alongside Downton for Middlesex in the early Nineties, has emerged this week as a candidate for a role which is likely to have wider powers of responsibility than assistant coaches have had in recent years.
The move opens up the possibility of Farbrace renewing a partnership with Bayliss. He worked as assistant coach to Bayliss with Sri Lanka from 2007-2009, when the team reached No 2 in the Test rankings and the World Twenty20 final.
Farbrace said in a newspaper interview this week that he was not ready to be England’s head coach and talked in glowing terms about Bayliss. “Part of me would like the next coach to be English, but Trevor would do an excellent job,” he said.
“He is very calm and a hands-on coach. He’s not someone you would see a lot of, he will be working in the background.
“He coaches people to make decisions and sort it out for themselves. Alastair Cook had a tough winter and needs to come through as a strong leader. If you have too-dominant a coach it could create a clash.
“Someone like Trevor could almost work under Cooky and give him confidence. England’s biggest task is to make sure the new coach matches well with Cooky because the captain needs to be the leader.”
Farbrace and Bayliss were on the Sri Lankan team bus that was attacked by terrorists in Lahore in 2009 and helped the players through that ordeal before Farbrace returned to England as Kent’s director of cricket. He later joined Yorkshire, saying he wanted to work with younger cricketers, and was highly regarded at Headingley for his work with junior players such as Alex Lees and Joe Root.
Farbrace has coached at all ECB age group set-ups, and that familiarity with the English game and county cricket would plug any gaps in Bayliss’s knowledge of the domestic circuit in this country.
He would also have worked with Moores when the former England coach was head of the ECB academy in Loughborough.
Robinson impressed the ECB over the winter with his handling of the Lions team in Sri Lanka and there will be a desire to promote a home-grown coach.
The appointment of Bayliss would cause consternation within the county set up, and teaming him with Farbrace would temper some of the criticism.
One complication is that all the candidates apart from Giles are contracted to other employers and the ECB wants to make a quick appointment, with England’s first international of the summer less than a month away on May 9, against Scotland in Aberdeen.
The county sides would not stand in the way of the appointment of Moores, Robinson or Newell but Bayliss may face difficulties extricating himself from the IPL, which began this week, while Farbrace signed a two-year contract with Sri Lanka in January.
