England coach must wield selection power

As the ECB wrestles with the fine print of a contract that is now expected to make Andrew Strauss England's first director of cricket, the overriding question that cricket fans the length and breadth of the country want answered is this: Who picks the team?

Not just who picks the team, but who will explain the team, who will take responsibility for the team, who will implement plans to change the team and whose job is on the line if time and again the team is not the correct one?

Yet it is by no means certain that this question will be answered under the ECB restructuring already underway. Michael Vaughan has reportedly withdrawn his interest in the role of England cricket director because the suggestions that England might appoint a football-style manager have been exaggerated. Enter Strauss, who has many fine qualities, but whose collegiate approach will not provide clarity unless somebody provides it for him.

English cricket has always been masterful when it comes to obfuscation over who actually selects the XI that takes to the field - and never is the situation more confused than when England are on tour. For all the grand talk about Vaughan or Strauss becoming a football-style manager, unless they are prepared to spend every day with England's international side, home and away, their authority to pick the team is automatically diminished.

The only person with true authority to select an England side is the coach. It is the coach who sees every game - on and off the field - who lives every net session, studies every piece of data, catches every flight, faces the media, takes the flak. It is the coach who is most likely to be sacked.

It is Peter Moores, as long as the job is his, whose role actually comes closest to that of a football-style manager. It is Moores whose job is now held to be on the line. With responsibility must come power - if not to Moores then the next coach in line. If they don't trust him then they must sack him. And the sooner the ECB embraces that simple fact the better.

English cricket has reached what should henceforth be known as its Adil Rashid moment. For Rashid, Yorkshire's legspinner, to be selected for England's tour of the West Indies and then not play on a responsive surface in Barbados was a moment of supreme inconsistency.

Perhaps he should never have been picked by the committee appointed for that purpose but, having been picked, he should have played in Barbados in conditions so obviously in his favour. Instead, England once again displayed a confusion of purpose that demands the system is simplified for good.

Colin Graves, the incoming ECB chairman (he actually begins the job officially next week after a job gestation that seems to have lasted for ever) takes office with a manifesto to clarify job roles, weed out unnecessary middle management and ensure roles come with responsibility.

Anybody who has any experience of management by committee will recognise the usual impotency. Without clear lines of command, the likelihood is that things stumble from one weak, half-decision to the next. What was a good thing one day, is a bad thing the next. Everybody keeps their head down when the flak flies. It is no way to organise. It is no way to achieve.

This reorganisation must start at the top. "If we knew the pitch would turn as much we might have picked a different side" was the gist of Moores' comment after England lost in the final Test in Barbados, drawing the series as a result. It would be a relief to find that Moores, as coach, was actually taking full responsibility and had merely slipped accidentally into the majestic plural. This being English cricket, it is doubtful that was the case. Many will blame Moores in any case, but it is unclear that the responsibility entirely rests with him.

The captain should have an input, the traditionalists cry, preferring a simpler world when cricket captains possessed an authority befitting a longer, more cerebral game, an authority rarely afforded to captains of football sides. Then the coaching assistant has a right to a chat over dinner, there is probably a senior professional in there somewhere although often those of us looking in from the outside are never entirely certain, having long understood that the question "Who picks the team?" is not as simple as it sounds.

And that is not all. If the national selector - in this case James Whitaker - is in town, he will expect an input. Perhaps some other selectors are around, too: best invite them along for a chat. Giles Clarke, in his role as ECB chairman, never officially intervened, but it is a safe bet that once or twice he could not resist expressing an opinion or two. And that is before you get to the coach driver. He probably gets a view as well.

Graves has repeatedly emphasised that he expects no role in selection, but such is England's complex selection process that he has struggled to get the message across. When he bullishly remarked that if Kevin Pietersen wanted to play for England again he had better start playing some county cricket, it was nothing more than a characteristically Yorkshire moment of plain speaking. Instead, it was misinterpreted as a promise, enough of a promise for Pietersen to abandon his IPL contract and play county cricket. Essentially, it was a sequence of events caused by obfuscation over who picks the England team.

A fortnight has passed since a "skeleton" job description for the role of director of England cricket was sent out to prospective candidates by a headhunting firm, Sports Recruitment International. The ECB is taking soundings before deciding exactly how the role should work. So here, entirely unrequested (we know our place on ESPNcricinfo) are some further soundings.

Let Strauss - or whichever candidate succeeds - set the general direction of England cricket. Let him have the power of veto for disciplinary reasons. Let the coach appoint a couple of scouts - no longer to be termed selectors - to help him monitor the county circuit. But let the coach pick the squad and then let the coach pick the team.

Nothing looked more ludicrous during the World Cup than England's then director of cricket, Paul Downton, donning a tracksuit and joining England for tactical discussions. A former England player admittedly, he still looked all the world like a company director on Dress Down Friday.

Strauss would possess more authority if he was present for every game, but even then it still would not do. Imagine how Jose Mourinho or Louis van Gaal would feel if their right to pick the team was even slightly questioned. (It happens at Leeds United apparently, but then that shows the mess they are in).

It can't be said often enough. The real football-style supremo is the England cricket coach. Let the coach pick the squad; let the coach pick the team.