At a time when the ECB are under pressure for reacting to the Ashes thrashing by sticking with the status quo, the appointment of Marcus North as England’s new national selector looks quietly shrewd – grown-up rather than headline-grabbing.
As an Australian who played 21 Tests – scoring a hundred on debut against South Africa at Johannesburg, and hitting two centuries and a 96 during the 2009 Ashes – he has the perspective of an outsider, and goodness knows English cricket needs more of that.
But as a player who represented six counties and has been director of cricket at Durham since 2018, he is more entrenched in the domestic game than many Englishmen.
It says plenty about the high regard in which he is held by English cricket that one of his first major tasks will be helping to select a side capable of wresting the Ashes from his homeland in 2027. Should that happen, the headlines will write themselves, not least in his native Melbourne.
North is the highest-profile Australian to assume a crucial role in English cricket since Trevor Bayliss became head coach in 2015. Before that, you have to go back to Rod Marsh, named director of what was then the new national academy in 2001. England didn’t hold the Ashes on both of those occasions either.
Had the ECB gone with either Steven Finn, a friend of head coach Brendon McCullum, or Darren Gough, who worked as a fast-bowling consultant with the England team as recently as 2019, they would have faced yet more accusations of ‘jobs for the boys’.
The ECB’s decision to appoint Marcus North as England’s new national selector looks quietly shrewd – grown-up rather than headline-grabbing
Australian North, who made two centuries during the 2009 Ashes, has since entrenched himself in the English game
Even Nottinghamshire’s well-regarded director of cricket Mick Newell, also in the running, would have felt like a blast from the past: he was an England selector between 2014 and 2018.
Instead, following the post-Ashes resignation of Luke Wright, the ECB have ticked another box marked ‘reconnecting with county cricket’, having already appointed their new ‘County Insight Group’ of four domestic coaches – Mickey Arthur, Richard Dawson, Anthony McGrath and Alan Richardson – tasked with providing a bridge between the Test team and the shires.
The jury remains out on whether the Insight Group can effect a genuine reconnection after three or four years in which runs and wickets in county cricket have largely played second fiddle to selectorial hunches. But the choice of North looks like the real thing, with both responsibility and accountability.
Neither can the board be accused of being starry-eyed. North, now 46, was a high-quality cricketer, whose batting was good enough to secure a first-class average of 40, with 37 centuries, and whose off-breaks earned him an unexpected place on the Lord’s honours board, thanks to figures of six for 55 in the neutral Test against Pakistan in 2010.
But, more than his playing CV, he has been chosen for the insight gained during more than 20 years in the English game, having met his wife, Joanne, while playing for Gateshead in 2000.
In 2017, after spells with Durham, Lancashire, Derbyshire, Gloucestershire, Hampshire and Glamorgan, he was still representing South Northumberland in the North East Premier League. He landed the Durham job the following year and went on to combine his role there with director of cricket at Northern Superchargers – now Sunrisers Leeds – in the Hundred.
Those two jobs have allowed close contact with Ben Stokes and Harry Brook, England’s red and white-ball captains; North also brought Andrew Flintoff into the Superchargers flock. With Flintoff now head coach of England Lions, their relationship will be crucial. North will need no introduction to English cricket’s biggest beasts.
North (far right) celebrates the wicket of Andrew Strauss during the 2010 Ashes Down Under – he will be tasked with helping take down his former side next summer
North (second from right) has done the hard yards behind the scenes at Durham – his hiring is a riposte to those who say the surest route into a plum England role is via the media centre
His role at Durham has also included administrative work – another riposte to those who have begun to wonder whether the surest route into a plum England role is via the media centre.
Once the final details of his new role have been finalised with the ECB, North’s first task is to preside over a squad for the first Test against New Zealand at Lord’s on June 4, with Durham’s own Ben McKinney and Emilio Gay in the mix to replace Zak Crawley as opener.
That squad could be announced as early as next week, before the sixth round of county championship matches, which means the fringe players may only have the round of games starting tomorrow to make one last impression.
And North will now be wearing a different hat.
