When Ashley Giles told his family on Christmas Day that he had one final present to share with them – namely that his return to Warwickshire had been finalised the day before and, after two years living out of a suitcase at Lancashire, he was coming home full-time – the reaction was not entirely one of universal excitement.
While his wife, Stine, and 16-year-old son, Anders, were delighted, his daughter Mathilde, 14, let out a small sigh: she thought he was about to tell them they were getting a dog. That one minor disappointment aside, it is fair to say the return of Giles to the club where he made his name first as a player and then head coach has gone down well in the West Midlands.
It represents a bold move by Warwickshire too, both in the replacement of their director of cricket, Dougie Brown, after he had overseen the club’s Royal London Cup victory last summer, and in sticking it out through weeks of negotiations with Lancashire to get their man. At one stage it looked like it could result in a year-long spell of gardening leave for Giles, only for a deal to be brokered with an undisclosed but not insignificant compensation package.
Having ended a successful spell at Old Trafford that brought promotion and the NatWest T20 Blast title during his first season as director of cricket, before avoiding relegation the following summer, Giles now takes up the newly created role of sport director at Edgbaston in what is a much broader job than his two previous positions in that it will see him head all aspects of Warwickshire’s cricket, both men and women, plus the academy pathways, recruitment and sport science.
In terms of the first team, the former England spinner will work above the club’s new head coach, Jim Troughton, thus reuniting the pair that, as director of cricket and captain, delivered their last County Championship title in 2012. With Ian Bell going into his second season as club captain, and a side still packed full of senior players from that era, it feels like they are getting the band back together.
“It does feel like coming home,” said Giles, who left the club after that title win for a brief role as England’s limited-overs coach but remained living in nearby Droitwich Spa. “But I have to be careful with saying that because I enjoyed two really good years at Lancashire, some of my best in cricket, and I don’t want it to look like I simply shot off when a job came up near my house.
“But the personal aspect became a big one. Being away from home became very difficult in my second year at Lancashire. When I was home, I wasn’t with it, I was just vacant for 24 hours before coming back down to earth, by which time the suitcase was already packed and I was off again. This role was different and much broader, too. Had it been the same as before, it would not have been the right role.”
While he will don a tracksuit from time to time, Giles has stressed that the first team is now very much Troughton’s domain, with his former captain stepping up from a previous role as fielding coach under Brown and working alongside Bell.
The pair will oversee a squad that, despite the 50-over trophy, largely underperformed last summer given the resources at their disposal, having failed to get out of the group stage in Twenty20 and avoided relegation from Division One of the championship only through victory over Giles’s Lancashire in the final round.
With Jeetan Patel topping 60 wickets and Keith Barker finishing one short of that figure among the bowlers, the blame instead fell on a batting unit in which only Jonathan Trott averaged more than 40 out of the top six and Bell, in a season he hoped could propel him back into the England fold, scored only one century.
Troughton said: “Winning a trophy last year, we should have been cock-a-hoop but we weren’t happy. And batting was an area where guys didn’t achieve what they wanted to. For me, it’s about Ian Bell concentrating on scoring runs and looking after the team on the field. I will take all the other pressures off him to do that job.”
While the sparky Troughton is doing this, his new boss will take a long‑term view working on a Warwickshire production line whose last proper alumnus – from age-group cricket to a capped first-team player – remains Chris Woakes. For Giles, this in part means tapping into an area not exploited properly by the club previously.
He said: “We will have to tap into the Asian cricket network in Birmingham better. Asian cricket is a massive area that has failed to be tapped into, even during my previous time at the club. We need to get to grips with that.”
