Alistair Orr

Surrey fans🤣🤣

You guys are upset with Orr leaving so I will let you off that you are talking Ringcycle about Surrey.

Have a nice Xmas!

Read my post properly, the fact of the matter is Farbrace & Orr had an irreparable bust up. Orr wanted out, Farbrace wanted him out, so he went out - the pay-rise is all a red herring.

Absolute disaster, rather Farbrace be the fall-guy myself. Club's going fast. Haines is next.

Did you forget your password for a year then bang your head and suddenly remember it?

Farbs interview in The Times

Bloody Steve James!” once exclaimed the late Glamorgan chairman Paul Russell to a group of journalists in exasperation at the latest fusillade of criticism aimed at my former county.

From long-suffering supporters to players who have devoted a long career to one county, passions run deep — often unfathomably deep. But people care, and that is why the county game, a veritable sporting cockroach, has managed to survive when so much logic has suggested it shouldn’t.

So it was no real surprise to see former players’ furore last week at the announcement that the 22-year-old Sussex opening batsman Ali Orr, surely an England Test prospect with a first-class average only a smidgen under 40, was moving to their local rivals Hampshire, despite a year remaining on his contract at Hove.

The likes of Matt Prior, Alan Wells and Chris Nash took to X, formerly Twitter, to voice their dissatisfaction. “Absolute shocker AGAIN from Sussex”, Prior wrote.

“I have coached and mentored Ali since he was nine years old. I find it very frustrating that a Sussex born and bred cricketer would leave a club that he loves,” Wells said, while Nash added that his departure was “not a good look”.

To those critics, the Sussex head coach, Paul Farbrace, has a clear message. “If any of those former players want to come and help me to make sure it doesn’t happen again, then I’m all ears,” he says. “Every club has former players that have their views, but I can’t please everyone all the time.

“It’s not the first time it has happened to me in my career — at Kent [where he was the coach in 2010-11] there was one bloke who constantly went on about my lack of playing experience and that it wouldn’t make me a very good coach, but I can’t stop that.”

It is fair to say that a lot has been happening at Hove in recent years, with a flurry of players and coaches leaving. There are too many to mention in full but think of Phil Salt, Chris Jordan, Ben Brown, Luke Wells, Delray Rawlins, George Garton, Jason Gillespie and Ian Salisbury.

Rob Andrew, the chief executive for a turbulent seven years, is about to leave for the ECB, and since the announcement of Orr’s departure, two former England players and club captains, Ian “Gunner” Gould and Chris Adams, have resigned from their positions on the cricket committee — and in Gould’s case, the main board too.

It has also emerged that Sarah Taylor, the former England wicketkeeper, who was blazing a trail as a female coach in the men’s game, is leaving her coaching role at the club.

It is my understanding that these three resignations are not directly linked to Orr’s departure but, for one so usually bubbly and optimistic, Farbrace, who describes it as “a pretty horrible week”, has clearly been shaken by recent events, coming at the end of his first season in charge at Sussex after three years as the sporting director at Warwickshire and five years as the England men’s assistant coach.

“My pride has been dented because a young player doesn’t want to work with me and doesn’t want to stay part of the team that we are trying to build,” Farbrace, 56, says. “Some might say I am emotional, but I’d like to say passionate. I care. I know I have made mistakes in the past, I might have made a mistake in this instance, but I have made it for what I think is the good of Sussex cricket.”

Ultimately it was Farbrace’s decision to release Orr, receiving compensation from Hampshire in the process, but he also admits that he has “not enjoyed one minute” of the reaction, particularly as a disagreement with the player during a County Championship match in September has been raised as a salient factor.

“Some might say that you brought it on yourself,” he says. “But ultimately I have not enjoyed it because I care passionately about Sussex cricket and the game of cricket.

“We started conversations with his agent back in May. Ali got injured in a T20 at the Oval, hurt his knee and missed three months, so I said there was no point pursuing the new contract while the player was not playing because the terms were not going to be as good as if he was playing and scoring lots of runs.

“We did have a spat at Derby in the championship game. It was his first game back. The following game against Gloucestershire, the last of the season, he batted [number] five first innings and that was a mistake — we should never have done that — and in the second innings I moved him to open.

“He played really well, and I am on record as saying it was the best he had played in my time at the club, not just because he got 60-odd but the way he constructed his innings. We had some really good conversations during that game and were in a really good place.

“We had a meeting with his agent in October and he said, ‘You’ve not offered him a new contract and he is the sort of bloke who likes to feel loved and wanted.’ I said, ‘You know why we haven’t. We want to offer him a new contract, a two-year extension on top of the year he has got left. He is going to open the batting in all forms and he is someone who we want to build the team around.’

“His agent said, ‘If you want to build a team around him, you should pay him more money. We think he is worth more than you are offering.’ I said, ‘We’ll try our best, but we can’t get to the level you’re wanting.’ The next time we spoke to him we said that if he started the season well, we would increase his money there and then, but we didn’t have the money then.

“He then said if you are not going to increase his salary he should be allowed to speak to other clubs. In the end I gave him a ten-day window. In that, he came back and said Hampshire had offered him a contract.

“I didn’t want to lose Ali, but I also don’t want to lose our other good young players. I have improved a lot of their contracts in terms of length of time, not necessarily financially, this year. [Henry] Crocombe, [Jack] Carson, [Tom] Haines, [Oli] Carter, [James] Coles and [Dan] Ibrahim — all of these lads have signed extended contracts.

“They know I am trying to create competition for places. The reason I’ve brought in one or two senior players like [Danny] Lamb and [John] Simpson is that we need some good senior players to help these young players to grow, because players learn from players.

“They grow through playing on the field with them. I remember Dan Mousley at Warwickshire batting with Ian Bell at Cardiff for 3½ hours. That is worth more than 500 nets with the best coach in the world.

“We are hoping to bring in Dan Hughes from Australia and my hope was he would help Orr, Haines and [Tom] Clark who, like him, are left-handed top-order batters, with their game. He could give them support that I and the rest of the coaches couldn’t possibly give them.

“That’s why we signed Steve Smith last year. That’s why we hope that [Cheteshwar] Pujara comes back this year. We are bringing in people to help our best youngsters, but I want to develop a spine of homegrown, young players. One of my things has been developing young players and helping them get better.

“Ali and I have spoken face to face. We have exchanged messages. It is all very pleasant and cordial. I don’t see an issue [with the spat at Derby]. If every player you have words with as a coach wants to leave, you’d be having players leaving every week. My job is not to be their best friend. My job is to help them improve. I think Ali Orr is a lad with a lot of potential, a lot of talent.”

As for the resignations of Gould and Adams, Farbrace says: “I’ve known Gunner for over 30 years and he and I have talked all the way through the summer. He has been a great help and support to me. Chris, I don’t know as well, but he has been nothing but helpful and supportive. In cricket committee meetings he has thanked me for my honesty, and we have had lots of other conversations about players and situations.

“My understanding is that both had said they were going to resign before [Orr’s departure]. I don’t think either enjoyed the way the cricket committee operates. I think they feel they should be involved more in day-to-day decision-making. Neither has spoken to me directly about the situation.

“I’m disappointed they have left. I am in charge of the decisions about professional cricket. I have not said ‘we’, I have said ‘I’. If it’s a wrong decision and people are angry with me, I take full responsibility for it.”

Farbrace would not elaborate on Taylor’s resignation, but he describes her as “an excellent coach” whom the likes of Charlotte Edwards and Lydia Greenway can now follow into the men’s game as a result of the success of the Hundred competition.

“The women’s game has benefited more than the men’s game from the Hundred,” he says. “But as a whole the Hundred is our money-maker, that is the tournament that is going to keep English cricket alive for the next 20 years. We’ve all got to get used to it and embrace it.

“It’s done everything that people wanted it to do. It has brought in a new audience, it fills the stadiums and is on live television. It is providing good cricket and also from an England selectors’ point of view it’s enabling them to see who can play under pressure in big games with full houses live on television.”

Farbrace accepts that the schedule needs to be looked at, however. “It’s not right, is it?” he says. “You can’t have teams getting home at two in the morning after a T20 game and then playing later that same day. We are short-changing the public because the players are not at their max. Something has to give. Everybody accepts it, everybody knows it, but no one has yet come up with a solution.”

One issue, though, to which Farbrace is well placed to provide a solution is the failure of the England 50-over side at the World Cup. Farbrace was involved in the calamitous 2015 tournament but then played a crucial part as the loquacious No 2 to the taciturn No 1, Trevor Bayliss, in England’s stunning rebuild.

“There are so many similarities to 2015,” he says. “The players have been honest, they’ve said, ‘We were rubbish and played poor cricket.’

“I was surprised how poorly they did because I genuinely thought they picked the right squad. You can always argue about one or two things — should Jason Roy have been picked, did we need [Dawid] Malan and [Joe] Root together at the top of the order? Personally I don’t think we did, but I wasn’t there.

“I just think we made some very simple errors. We weren’t well prepared. Between the World Cup in 2019 and this one we played six ODIs in the subcontinent — we only played 40-odd games altogether. The team they wanted had not really played together before the tournament. We underestimated that.

“They went away from what they are good at, which is being very instinctive and just taking the game on and being very positive. They looked like they got too caught up in stats. You win the toss against Afghanistan and you bat. You win the toss against South Africa and you bat them out of the game, you don’t worry about three T20 games that have been played in the IPL at that venue. They just got themselves a bit bogged down.”

So, what to do now? “I think it is a pretty simple process,” he says. “Motty [the England white-ball head coach Matthew Mott] is the right bloke to carry on. Motty now has the opportunity to say, ‘This is how we play and this is my blueprint of how we are going to play 50-over cricket for the next four years.’ He is a very calm person who has a great history of building teams.

“In 2015 Trevor wanted a strong, pugnacious opening batsman who thought he was the best player in the world: Jason Roy, absolutely. He wanted a wrist spinner that could spin it both ways: Adil Rashid. He wanted someone who could run in and bowl fast and take wickets in the middle overs: Liam Plunkett. He was very clear.

“We have got an abundance of white-ball talent. There are players coming out of our ears.”

Agreed WC, just pay the geezer.

Power trip backfired.