Calm, personable and innovative Mott can take England’s white-ball side to another level

“AB’s temper was legendary,” Hayden wrote. “We got into a bizarre and pretty comical routine of walking down the wicket, eyeballing each other and then returning to our respective ends.” But Hayden also recalls that the two young players in that formidable Queensland side who “got away with the most with AB” were Andrew Symonds, who died in a car crash, aged 46, last month, and Matthew Mott.

They would call Border “Grandpa Smurf”. When he was out of form, they suggested he used the drills famously advocated by the former Australian batsman John Inverarity, whereby the batsman drives a ball rolled along the ground to work on his timing. Border did so and it worked, with Symonds and Mott “becoming the only youngsters bold enough to offer a batting tutorial to a man who’d played over 150 Tests”, according to Hayden.

This insight is instructive in a number of ways about Mott, England’s new white-ball head coach. Firstly, it shows an early inclination towards coaching; secondly, it demonstrates a certain cheekiness and confidence. Having seen him in action at Glamorgan, I would also add the adjectives genial, understanding and engaging to any character reference. This brings us to a third observation, and probably the most important – Mott’s renowned people skills.

That ability to engender relationships with all types of players, regardless of age or seniority, is at the heart of his coaching philosophy. Mark Wallace, the director of cricket at Glamorgan, was captain for two of Mott’s three years at the county from 2011 to 2013.

“His style is quite relaxed and laid-back,” Wallace says. “He is very much about how each player can get the best out of themselves to be successful and then trying to use that to gel the team together. He is not going to dictate and put hard and fast rules down on how to play. He is not that sort of coach at all. He is about building relationships.”

This is echoed by Meg Lanning, the captain during his incredibly successful time coaching Australia Women from 2015 until last month, a period in which they won two T20 World Cups, three Ashes series, two ICC Women’s Championships and, most recently, the one-day World Cup.

“His ability to build relationships and trust with players and staff allows him to be so successful and to challenge you, because once you have built that trust you are more likely to take on a bit of constructive feedback,” Lanning says. “He was really big on the players and leadership group, myself and Rach Haynes, driving things as much as possible.

“The great thing about Motty is he is able to read situations really well and when he felt he needed to be assertive, he did that. When he felt it was best coming from myself or Rach, he let us. He has been a huge influence on our team. It is a huge loss to us and we will certainly miss him. England have got a good one, that’s for sure.”

Indeed, Mott seems a very good fit for an England white-ball side who have also been very successful and, as with Australia and Lanning, have a strong captain in Eoin Morgan. In this respect, it is worth noting the influence that Trevor Bayliss, the former England head coach, has had on Mott, who once worked as his assistant coach at New South Wales. Both Bayliss and Mott spent time coaching at Kent (where Mott met Rob Key, the ECB’s new managing director of men’s cricket, in 2007) on an exchange scheme initiated by Steve Waugh. “Motty is very close to Trevor Bayliss,” Wallace says. “He is almost one of his disciples.”

The modest Bayliss naturally chuckles at that. “We obviously worked together,” he says. “People have asked me about influences on my coaching career and everyone I’ve worked with, you take not just the good but some of the bad experiences as well. I’m sure Motty is smart enough to have done that too.”

Given how well Bayliss rubbed along with Morgan, it is little surprise the former thinks that Mott, 48, will enjoy a similarly productive relationship with England’s white-ball captain. “They’re both big on having a good environment, both very calm under pressure and are good communicators,” he says. “Motty has taken the Australian women’s team to greater heights and that is where the England white-ball team is at the moment too. That’s why I think it is a good appointment. He has been working with a team that was very successful, but he took them to another level. Hopefully he can do the same with England.”

It would be good to report all the qualities Bayliss saw in Mott when securing him as his assistant at NSW, but the truth is that Bayliss had nothing to do with that appointment. “I didn’t know him, I obviously knew of him,” Bayliss says. “But Motty is one of those blokes who will fit right in wherever he is. He fitted in within the first ten minutes. He is just one of those guys who gets on with people.”

In what could be a description of Bayliss, Lanning says of Mott: “One of his greatest strengths is to stay level and calm. He got cranky here and there, but I don’t think I ever saw him lose his temper. He was very aware of the impact his body language and behaviours could have. It was always positive, never flustered.”

The new England Test coach, Brendon McCullum, has long been a fan of Mott’s, recommending him for the New Zealand job that Mike Hesson eventually got in 2012, having worked with Mott in the Indian Premier League with Kolkata Knight Riders and at New South Wales.

In his autobiography, ‘Declared’, McCullum describes how Mott, who was the assistant coach at Kolkata, took him for a session on the bowling machine days before the IPL began in 2008. McCullum was in horrible nick.

“I was hopeless,” he wrote. “After an hour, he showed his coaching chops by canning that, and took me to the hotel bar and ordered a beer. We just sat and talked cricket, shot the breeze, and I went to bed relatively relaxed.

“I’m not advocating a glass of beer as a cure-all, but Mott had the psychological smarts to see that more practice wasn’t going to fix my anxieties, and that taking me under his wing socially and making a friendly connection was the right thing to do.”

On the IPL’s opening night, McCullum made a pyrotechnic 158 not out off 73 balls.

“That story is a good one as I always thought Motty was a good coach of players who were out of form,” Wallace says. “He’d do it by building that relationship and saying things like, ‘You’re obviously a good player and you’ve had success before.’ Whereas some coaches will go super-technical, Motty was more about, ‘You’ve got that skill to fall back on,’ and just trying to find those little things to knock you back into rhythm.”

Mott was a decent left-handed top-order batsman for Queensland and Victoria. He once shared a partnership of 446 with Symonds for the Gold Coast under-19s. In 66 first-class matches, Mott averaged 33.84 with seven centuries, the highest of them being 216 for Victoria in 2003 against New South Wales.

When announcing his appointment, Key mentioned that Mott would be able to oversee any transitions the white-ball side might need to undergo, with the captaincy of Morgan, 35, an obvious example. Wallace points to how well Mott managed the end of Robert Croft’s career at Glamorgan as an indicator.

“Motty very skilfully transitioned Crofty while utilising the ability he still had, but with an eye on getting other spinners into the side,” Wallace says. “He did it very respectfully. He’s done that with other teams. He also left Ellyse Perry out [of Australia Women’s T20 side]. He is not going to be scared to make those calls.”

Lanning agrees. “We took risks at times in terms of bringing younger players in,” she says. “That is something they might have to think about with England, about integrating those younger players because you can’t do it all at once.”

Wallace stresses that Mott was as capable a coach in four-day cricket as he was in the shorter stuff – “he is very rounded” – but picks out his ability to “clarify people’s roles” as being a strong aspect of his white-ball coaching. As Mott said of Australia Women when they sought to recover from losing to India in the 2017 World Cup semi-final: “The single most used excuse is, ‘I just didn’t know my role and I wasn’t clear.’ ”

So, Mott and Lanning sorted that. “Motty was very good at setting out expectations really early so players were very clear on where they were going to play a role,” Lanning says. “The feedback we got from players was great, even if it sometimes wasn’t what they wanted to hear.”

Mott is strong enough as a coach to delegate and introduce fresh voices and ideas to his group. At Glamorgan he brought in the fielding coach Mike Young, a former baseball coach from the United States who worked with the Australia team for a T20 campaign. The move was considered very innovative at the time.

He immersed himself in the Welsh culture and Glamorgan history, inviting former players to speak to the squad and take the odd training session (even yours truly was asked to do a session on facing short-pitched bowling), and so it is a natural step for Mott to make his family home in Cardiff while with England, just as another former Glamorgan coach, Duncan Fletcher, did when promoted to England coaching duties.

-The Times

Originally published as Calm, personable and innovative Mott can take England’s white-ball side to another level