Settling old scores

English cricket was in a desperate state seven years ago. The players had just been booed off the field after defeat at home by New Zealand. Team morale was poor, while there was little organisation and no vision.

To the rescue came Duncan Fletcher, a little-known coach from Zimbabwe. He had few connections at the top of the England game, and employed his own methods. Fletcher turned out to have a remarkable knack for spotting the international potential of apparently middling players in the county game: Marcus Trescothik, Andrew Strauss, Michael Vaughan and Simon Jones are some of his personal picks. He had a quiet and inscrutable manner, preferring to guide his players rather than instruct. The England cricket captain Michael Atherton, a very good judge whose international career was drawing to a close when Fletcher arrived on the scene, is adamant that Fletcher was ‘the best professional coach England have had’.

Slowly he turned the ship round. By 2005 Fletcher had structured the best England team since the 1960s. More than anyone else — even Flintoff and Pietersen — he deserves the credit for that year’s famous victory in the Ashes. Sadly 2005 did not announce the dawn of a new era. It was followed by an anti-climactic winter tour of Pakistan, and then the humiliating 2006/7 Ashes series when England found themselves on the receiving end of their first 5–0 series whitewash at the hands of the Australians for 80 years.

Throughout this time Fletcher remained unknowable, hidden behind his famous dark glasses. He said very little in public, and bore the brunt of many criticisms that might more fairly have been aimed at fellow selectors or at the players themselves.

In this always fascinating book Fletcher emerges fully into the open for the first time.