Andrew Strauss: ‘We’d be mad to be satisfied by Ashes win’
Andrew Strauss puts the Ashes win in perspective in his interview in the special 2009 Review issue of SPIN, which is in shops from Friday November 27.
SPIN: You’re very feet-on-the-ground about the Ashes win, aren’t you? There’s no triumphalism – you feel it was the start of something rather than the end-goal…
Andrew Strauss: It has to be. Look at our world ranking and look where Australia are. Anyone who thinks that we’ve achieved our life goal would be… mad. Quite frankly.
But it is the life goal of every English cricketer to win the Ashes…
Well, it is, but…
So it would be a reasonable reaction to think ‘job done’…
Exactly. It’s so important to our country: the history, the tradition, the rivalry. But in pure cricketing terms at the moment, there are bigger challenges for us. We may not have the same euphoria if we win in South Africa, but it’s a bigger challenge. I personally think it’s sad that the England team has never been the No 1 team in the world for any extended period of time, certainly in one- day cricket. And we’re going to be taking as many steps as we can to make sure we get somewhere near that.
To England fans, the 6-1 NatWest Series defeat to Australia after the Ashes may have looked similar to the 5-0 thrashing your side took against Sri Lanka in 2006. Has there been any progress at all? Did the two series feel any different to you?
Well, some of the traits were similar. At that time [2006] we had a pretty good Test side but we were experimenting with one-day players: Tim Bresnan and a couple of other players came in for that Sri Lanka series probably when they weren’t quite ready. This time, we are maybe a bit more settled as a side. But when you’re losing like that it makes you reassess what you’re doing as a side. Myself and Andy Flower have a number of areas that we feel we have to improve upon if we want to compete with some of these teams away from home as well as at home in the future. And the Australian defeat was really a catalyst for us to start putting some of those plans into action…
Writing in SPIN, Eoin Morgan said that defeat gave England a new carefree, nothing-to-lose approach to their batting. He used the phrase ‘hell-for-leather’…
Well, there’s a number of things we’re looking to do, some of which we haven’t spoken to the players about yet, actually. But that attacking intent is a good one, away from home in particular. To live with the likes of India and some of these teams you have to play that way. But at the same time, you can’t use that as a crutch: ‘I got out but at least I played my shots’. We need to be more consistent as a batting unit, so we need to improve our skills. If we want to be more attacking and more consistent, our skills need to improve a lot.
Andrew Strauss’ book, Testing Times – In Pursuit of the Ashes’ is published by Hodder and is in shops now. This is an extract from an interview in the Christmas issue of SPIN, also featuring Stuart Broad, Michael Vaughan, Garry Sobers, Viv Richards and the debut of Andy Caddick as our hard-hitting star columnist – as well as our now-traditional Top 50 countdown of the year.
