England sack Moores: Hussain backs Gillespie for coaching role

Sport360 staff 09:45 10/05/2015
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Mail
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • WhatsApp
  • Pinterest
  • LinkedIn
  • Gillespie (r) has been extremely successful with Yorkshire.

    Nasser Hussain said former Australia fast bowler Jason Gillespie was the right man to revive England’s flagging fortunes following the sacking of Peter Moores as the national side’s coach.

    Moores, also England coach from 2007 to 2009, was axed for the second time on Saturday, shortly after the England and Wales Cricket Board announced Andrew Strauss had been appointed to the newly-created role of director of cricket.

    Paul Farbrace, currently England’s assistant coach, will be in charge for the upcoming two-Test series at home to New Zealand that starts at Lord’s on May 21. But that still leaves open the possibility that Gillespie, currently the coach of English county champions Yorkshire, could be in permanent command of his old foes when they face Australia in the first Ashes Test in Cardiff on July 8.

    Under the 40-year-old Gillespie, Yorkshire have produced England regulars in batsmen Joe Root and Gary Ballance, with several others waiting in the wings.

    Hussain, like Strauss an ex-England captain who played against Gillespie during the paceman’s 71-Test career that yielded 259 wickets, told Sky Sports: “I really like Jason Gillespie, I have to say. What Yorkshire have done as a club, their academy structure, it’s absolutely phenomenal.

    “You just have to look at the England set-up to see how many good Yorkshire players are coming through, and I think Jason takes a lot of credit for that — and the way he’s handled himself.”

    Gillespie was brought on board at Headingley four years ago by incoming ECB chairman Colin Graves, who then held a similar role with Yorkshire.

    “Any opportunity that comes up you obviously look at,” Gillespie told the Adelaide Advertiser. “It is flattering but I still have a job to do.”

    Both Moores’s exit and Strauss’s appointment had long been trailed in the British media, particularly after England’s embarrassingly early departure from this year’s World Cup in Australia and New Zealand.

    Speculation about the 52-year-old coach’s future intensified last week after England’s five-wicket defeat inside three days in the third and final Test in Barbados meant they were held to a 1-1 draw by a West Indies side labelled “mediocre” by Graves before the series started.

    Reports that Moores would indeed be sacked emerged on Friday during England’s washed-out one-day international away to Ireland in Malahide. But it wasn’t until Saturday that the ECB confirmed his dismissal.

    That led former England captain Michael Vaughan to say that the way in which the ECB handled Moores’s departure had been “disgraceful”.

    “I am not the biggest fan of Peter Moores as a coach but I like him as a person and the only word I can use for the way his sacking was handled is disgraceful,” wrote Vaughan, England’s captain when they won the Ashes in 2005, in his Daily Telegraph column.

    “It is not the first time this has happened. News broke of Alastair Cook’s sacking as one-day captain before he knew about it and now the same has happened with Peter.

    “It is a poor way to treat two men who have given everything to English cricket.”

    Recommended