Trevor Bayliss in line for Hundred role: England cricket coach set to lead Birmingham team next summer

EXCLUSIVE
Bayliss will step down as England coach after four and a half years at the end of this summer’s Ashes
Gareth Copley/Getty Images
Will Macpherson13 March 2019

Trevor Bayliss is highly likely to be head coach of the Birmingham team in English cricket’s new competition, the Hundred, which begins next summer.

Bayliss will step down as England coach after four and a half years at the end of this summer’s Ashes and plans to go freelance, picking up jobs in two or three short-form competitions.

And the 56-year-old Australian, who has overseen a transformation in England’s limited-overs cricket, has intended the ECB’s new competition to be one of those for some time.

This will unite Bayliss with his long-time coaching partner Paul Farbrace, who has left the England set-up just months before the World Cup and Ashes to take over as sporting director at Warwickshire, the host county of the Birmingham team. There, Farbrace — whose working relationship with Bayliss is more than a decade old — replaces England’s new director of cricket Ashley Giles.

The head coaches, and the general managers they will work with, are to be announced in the coming months, in time for October’s draft which will match players and teams.

Each of the eight teams will have a coaching budget of £200,000, and the ECB have long been keen to bring glamour to the dugouts with big-name coaches. It is understood Shane Warne is keen on a return to the Ageas Bowl, where he played for Hampshire, while Stephen Fleming — the former New Zealand captain who has enjoyed IPL success with Chennai Super Kings — could come back to Trent Bridge, where he played for Nottinghamshire.

Andrew McDonald, who led Melbourne Renegades to this year’s Big Bash title, is of interest to the teams in Manchester and Cardiff.

How each host county’s director of cricket is set to be involved with the new team is to be confirmed.

The Hundred, with the tagline “Every Ball Counts”, remains a tournament in flux that is unpopular with many cricket fans but the governing body are bullish. The ECB’s aim is to engage a new audience through free-to-air TV coverage on the BBC (alongside Sky Sports), and with new city-based teams that will change the look of the sport.

Counties are set to be informed of identities in the next month but it is possible that they may not be announced to the public until weeks before October’s draft. The teams are the product of months of extensive but unpublished research, and the team identities could include a mix of geographical names, references to grounds (such as the Oval) and non-location-specific names.

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