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The post-Strauss era is a thing. We’re sure of it. We’re just not quite sure it should be called that.
It’s actually quite hard to identify different eras for a cricket team. You can label different chunks of time according to who was head coach, but lots of players will overlap different coaching eras so that’s not generally very neat or satisfying.
Sometimes you get a wave of players who stick around for a while, but they never arrive exactly simultaneously, which means the edges of player-defined eras are woolly and indistinct.
We often talk about “the Nineties” as England fans. This label doesn’t cover all the matches played in the Nineties and nothing else though. There were matches played in that decade that weren’t very Nineties in an England cricket sense. Equally, there were matches played in the late-Eighties and early-2000s that were decidedly Nineties.
The label’s accurate enough to have stuck though.
The Nineties was an era that was in large part defined by regular batting collapses. We’ve also had a lot of collapses since Andrew Strauss retired. We’ve done a thing for Cricket 365 campaigning for this period to be considered an era.
Since 2012, the England Test team has delivered regular batting collapses, a rotating cast of openers and a far greater number of middle-order all-rounders than should ever be crammed into a side. Those are the features that define the era.
We actually think the era might be about to end because England have picked a load of top order batsmen for this New Zealand tour. When we look back on the double-digit totals and all-rounder-ism of these last few years, what will we call this period?
The Alastairopene Era?
That’s a mouthful.
It should also probably, correctly, be called the Alastairocene Era
The era of total-bits-n-pieces-cricket
That does sum it up quite well.
The next few years will be defined by promising but fragile fast bowlers getting repeatedly called up and injured.
They’ll call it The Stone Age.
Thanks.
Nice.
Also The Wood Age, which should really have been a thing.
The teenies, obvs.
The term covers the numbers of the years and the batting averages of the England top three.
This is good.
I think this is my favourite.
Building on this … because they are neither one thing or another … yo-yoing from brilliance to incompetence … the Inbetweeners?
Or maybe the Inbetweenies.
I dunno.
I know one of the hallmarks is the batting failures but somehow The Fast-Medium Era seems fitting
Sadly that’s most eras for England.
Most pundits have called it The Revolving Door, which is quite pithy.
Again, it’s not really a feature unique to this era though, is it?
Since Strauss ascended to a higher plane, we’ve had three captains of the test team. I like to think of them by one or both of their initials – P, AC, and R.
Can you see where this is going?
SAC, surely.
Which also works.
The Minimalist Movement?
The Broadening.
That’s the word for it in an alternate timeline ; a pity I wasn’t there to see it.
My problem with the submissions so far is none of them are managementspeaky enough, and as such they miss off a core feature of this era.
Perhaps the “Execution Era”? Bit brutal, but in 2019 (and in 2010, which was post-Strauss in T20I terms, so the era is nicely straddled) they did indeed execute. And in between they killed off the careers of a lot of their players.