Andrew Strauss, the director of England cricket, is to resume his review of the Test series defeat to India with Alastair Cook’s continuation as captain top of his list of things to consider. Strauss returned from a family holiday in Australia on Friday and will meet Cook next week.
Cook ended the pre-Christmas tour – a 4-0 defeat to Virat Kohli’s world No1 side – stating that he needed time to decide whether he remains the right man for the role. But even if he opts to plough on as Test captain after a record 59 matches in charge, Strauss, his predecessor, may yet conclude that fresh energy is required to take the team forward. With summer series ahead against South Africa and West Indies before next winter’s Ashes tour, Joe Root would be the expected successor if Cook is stood down.
The England management team is in India before the one-day leg of the tour – in which Kohli has now replaced MS Dhoni as captain of India’s limited-overs team. They remain privately unsure which way Strauss and Cook’s deliberations will go.
While the reasons for the defeat to India went well beyond on-field tactics, there was a sense that after four years in the job, a desire to one day return to the playing ranks and continue his record-breaking career with the bat could sway things, despite the obvious draw of leading the side back to Australia and avenging the 5-0 Ashes defeat in 2013-14.
However, the expectation from Neil Fairbrother, the former England and Lancashire batsman who now manages the affairs of Root, along with a number of the current team, is that Cook will remain captain going into the summer.
Fairbrother wrote on the website of International Sports Management: “Amid the furore of the last day of Test cricket in Chennai, where England succumbed in a very tired manner, it was difficult to see how Cook was going to take the team into 2017.
“Cook’s interview at the end of play, in particular his look, reminded me of how some of our greatest Test match captains looked at the end of their tenures, haunted and exhausted.
“But Cook is not only a fantastic Test match batsman with a stubborn streak for scoring runs, he is also capable, as we have already seen, of picking himself up, dusting himself down and moving forward when all seems lost.
“As time goes forward into January, and no doubt the captain’s pain is receding by the day, I guess it less and less likely that he may retire from tossing the coin.”
One change for England will come at the end of the 2017 season, however, with major sponsors Investec announcing on Friday that they are calling an early end to their relationship with the England and Wales Cricket Board six years into a 10-year agreement. While the press release notes a change in marketing strategy from the bank, the triggering of a break clause in the £40m contract that gave them naming rights for all home Test series is understood to have been prompted in part by the ECB’s decision to bring in another banking brand, NatWest, as shirt sponsor for the senior teams.
NatWest branding will replace that of current sponsors Waitrose on the official kit from the start of the summer, which will be supplied by New Balance when the current arrangement with Adidas ends following England’s one-day tour of the Caribbean in early March.
