tiptoes,
Thanks for that. Perhaps you can place the site in a prominent place on the Forum, so anyone can use it. I never knew this
existed.
Meanwhile, what a massive feature this is. I have copied and pasted it and thrown a few of the photos in for good measure.
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In September, 183-year-old Sussex, the oldest of the 18 counties, tried something new.
It invited its members to renew. They could do so in the standard fashion, for one season, or they could do it in unprecedented five, 10, or 15-year packages. This offer came with the slogan: “Marching To Our Future”. Sussex’s supporters ridiculed the initiative on social media, but only because if they did not laugh they would cry. County members across the country feel under siege by the England and Wales Cricket Board’s high-performance review and the conversation around the future of domestic cricket, which makes it hard to know how the game will look or what a county membership will be worth in 15 weeks’ time, let alone 15 years.
Sussex members feel more battered than most. Around 1,600 members remain at Hove, which is the lowest count in living memory and around a third of the total from 2007. These devotees were coming to the end of what one seasoned watcher calls “the most depressing year I’ve ever known”. A cursory glance at Twitter or message boards reveals frustration over the team’s performance and the work of Rob Andrew, the CEO best known for playing fly-half for England and the British & Irish Lions.
Two days before the packages were launched, Sussex had been thrashed by an innings and plenty by Durham in their penultimate match of a season in which they would finish 17th out of 18 in the County Championship. They recorded only one win in 14 matches, the same as in 2021, and have just three wins in three years. In the Vitality Blast, they experienced their worst T20 campaign since 2013. In the Royal London Cup they did well to secure a home semi-final, only to be beaten by an experienced Lancashire side. By then, it was an open secret that Ian Salisbury, the head coach, was no longer fulfilling his role. Salisbury and Sussex go way back, but his time at the club ended in mysterious fashion.
The former England spinner came through the system at Sussex more than 30 years ago. He met his wife, Emma, who died of cancer a couple of years ago, at Hove. That made his return to coach, initially as an assistant, emotional. Ahead of the 2021 season, he was promoted to lead a young group and was promised time, but one-and-a-half seasons in, he was gone. Salisbury was told to stay away – ahead of an inevitable departure – because of the breakdown of his relationship with the off-spinner Jack Carson at least a month earlier. County cricket’s worst-kept secret was that a relationship between Carson and the coach’s daughter had ended, and contact broke down.
An investigation was held, but Salisbury’s departure was not announced until the end of the season, weeks after he finished coaching the team. Salisbury’s name did not get a mention when Andrew gave a cheery 15-minute interview to the club’s channels a month after the season ended. That episode was emblematic of a messy year. In 2022 Sussex used 36 players, including seven overseas and five loanees. The team sheet was not only a mystery game to game, but totally unrecognisable from just five years earlier due to a major cost-cutting exercise that required a £300,000 reduction in the playing staff’s wage bill during the pandemic.
Was Salisbury Unfairly Treated?
As a result, a very handy XI can be built of quality county pros who have left Sussex for pastures new in recent years, and that is before you consider those who have retired. As so many were homegrown, few wanted to leave. Most, as one insider says, left “with a very bitter taste in their mouth”. NDAs have become as common at Hove as squawking seagulls. A current county XI made up of ex-Sussex stars: Phil Salt (Lancashire), Luke Wells (Lancashire), Harry Finch (Kent), Laurie Evans (Surrey), Ben Brown (Hampshire), Michael Burgess (Warwickshire), David Wiese (Yorkshire), Chris Jordan (Surrey), Danny Briggs (Warwickshire), Abi Sakande (Leicestershire), Reece Topley (Surrey).
In their place, Sussex backed homegrown youth in a manner not seen on the county circuit in recent memory. The side that faced Worcestershire in August 2021 was thought to be the youngest ever fielded in the Championship: it contained six teenagers, no capped players, and had an average age of 19. Skipper Tom Haines has just turned 24, but 13 cricketers played for Sussex this summer who are younger than him. Unsurprisingly, the going has been tough. Haines’ opening partner Ali Orr is considered one of the most promising batters in the country; at 21, he has played 19 first-class matches, and won just one.
For Sussex, a self-styled family club that has long been easy to fall in love with, things have not always been like this. This century began with a golden era. Between 2001 and 2010 Sussex won 10 trophies, including their first three County Championships. They finished third in the Championship in 2013 and 2014. But since a surprise relegation in 2015, the red-ball side has never come particularly close to promotion, and a white-ball team studded with stars has failed to win a trophy, too. Sussex has become a county divided – and not by East and West. Matt Prior, who has more caps for England than any Sussex men’s player, is among a group of former players who regularly speak out on social media against the hierarchy – Andrew and performance director Keith Greenfield.
The pair have remained in their roles until now, with the board disagreeing with Prior’s assessment that they have “destroyed” the club. Chairman Jon Filby provides a robust defence of the duo, whose task has been unenviable. But a malaise has set in; it is the talk of club cricket in the county, while morale is said to be low among staff at Hove.The on-field decline of Sussex’s men’s senior team is plain. The reasons include the degradation of a strong culture, financial difficulties exacerbated by the pandemic leading to desperately difficult decisions for the management, and ultimately some poor luck.More difficult to gauge is the state of play off the field, but Sussex are not doing everything wrong. Filby, the chair since March, is almost permanently optimistic, except when talking about the high-performance review. He was among the most robust critics of the suggestions over the county schedule.
Filby points to “probably the best balance sheet in county cricket, with not a penny of debt”. That is in part down to the redevelopment at Hove, which has seen 37 flats (called the Tate Residences), built and sold, on the site of the old Sussex Cricketer pub. There will also be two floors of office space and a new pub fitted. “That will bring £400,000 annually to the club’s bottom line, which is remarkable,” says Filby. “Rob Andrew deserves credit for that, and our commercial operation is really strong.” Further development is planned for the ground.
Concerts at the county ground – Michael Buble played this summer – have proved so successful that during the high-performance review, a Sussex official raised concerns that there was not enough thought being given to a county like theirs. In response, they were asked what they would like to take place in August. “Concerts,” was said to be the answer.
Filby points to Sussex’s strong record in the women’s game, which has seen Freya Davies and Freya Kemp graduate to international honours, following the likes of Clare Connor and Sarah Taylor (who is part of the club’s coaching team). On the men’s side, Sussex has provided a steady stream of coaches to the ECB: Mark Robinson, Jon Lewis, Carl Hopkinson and, in the last month, Michael Yardy and Luke Wright. The club is known for having some of the country’s best facilities. They have a strong record providing players, too: in 2021, six – all of whom came through different routes to the top – played for England, although two of those (Phil Salt and Chris Jordan) have since joined the player exodus.
“We are proud that we helped them all play for England,” says Filby. “The current crop is hugely promising, especially in the batting. Tom Haines and Jack Carson have won England Lions selection this winter.” Orr was unlucky not to join them.That Sussex contribute strongly to the English game is evident, and the well will not run dry. Sussex have built a partnership with Oxfordshire. “We have 185 clubs, they have similar,” says Filby, “So we have doubled the size of our pathway”.
Jon Filby, Sussex CCC Chairman
Harrison Ward and James Coles have already made first-team debuts thanks to the tie-up. Locally, Sussex have partnered with Brighton Aldridge Community Academy, to “provide state school cricketers with private school education”; BACA has an indoor school, support from Sussex coaches and groundsmen. Next summer, there will be around 50 full-time cricket scholars at the school. For similar reasons, they are focusing on Crawley, where 63 teams play, but there are only 10 grounds. Right now, almost all those players Sussex produce are fast-tracked straight into the senior team, with little time to learn on the job with senior players all offloaded. This has resulted, former players believe, in a listlessness in Sussex’s cricket. Lewis Hatchett came through the Sussex system before being forced to retire aged 26 in 2016, following a triumph against adversity that saw him play 26 first-class matches despite being born with Poland Syndrome which leads to problems through one side of the body. Hatchett has remained a club cricketer in the area and an interested, fair observer of the county’s fortunes. He remembers the Sussex dressing room he came into in the 2000s, full of senior players.
“The culture of that team was so strong,” he says. “As a young player it was so obvious what you had to do. In order to break into the team, you had to work so hard, and learn from what the older guys were doing. That would be the difference between then and now. “It’s brilliant that Sussex have Cheteshwar Pujara. He will instil great values in young players. But one or two older players can’t do that for a whole squad. One or two learn from the majority, the majority don’t learn from one or two.” Hatchett bought so strongly into that culture that he defied his mother’s hatred of tattoos to have the club’s crest and his cap number inked onto his arm. “I am Sussex born,” he says, “I love the place, its history, and we worked on fostering that stuff. Somewhere, that got lost.”
Some players believe the decline began before even Mark Robinson left the club in 2016, and Hatchett admits surprise that the tragic death of Matthew Hobden almost seven years ago did not galvanise the group. The problems appear to have accelerated when Andrew took over in 2017 and appointed Jason Gillespie to replace Mark Davis as head coach. Sussex players at the time still remember the moment they were informed that Gillespie would be their new coach. Doing winter training at the Withdean, Brighton’s three-sided old stadium, in late 2017, there was palpable excitement in the group over an iconic player who had coached Yorkshire to two County Championships not long before.
It looked like the dream appointment for a club seeking a way out of Division Two but, from the start, players had concerns about whether the partnership could work. Due to commitments at home in Adelaide, Gillespie would arrive just before the season began, miss the winter, when so much planning, team building and individual improvement takes place. Players worried about Gillespie’s lifestyle away from training, and felt there was a constant threat he would leave to coach South Australia (he eventually did). They also felt he deepened the divide between Sussex’s superb white-ball side, which Filby describes as full of “galaticos” from the T20 circuit, and those plugging away with diminishing success in the Championship. He would jokingly call the T20 side “the franchise boys”. Gillespie declined to be interviewed by Telegraph Sport for this article.
It was in Gillespie’s final year, 2020, that a glut of departing players truly alarmed those inside the club and beyond the boundary, but the beginning of the exodus predated the Australian’s time in charge. In 2017, Matt Machan and Chris Nash were both made to sign NDAs on their way out. Machan retired due to injury at just 26, while Nash ended a lifelong association with the club aged 34 to join Nottinghamshire after a reported issue over the captaincy, which was handed to Ben Brown.
Brown left in 2021, taking a pay cut to join Hampshire after being stripped of the captaincy himself, in a bitter moment for fans. That was the same summer as Jordan and Salt – among others – left, and a year later than kolpaks Stiaan van Zyl and David Wiese, county imports Laurie Evans and Danny Briggs, and local boys Harry Finch and Luke Wells. That was another grievous loss for fans as Wells’ roots ran deep through his father, former captain Alan, and uncle Colin. This was Sussex’s age of austerity. A ruthless cost-cutting exercise that may have been necessary, but was at times difficult to square. Wells was told he was not a white-ball player, but this year played in both the Vitality Blast and Royal London Cup finals for Lancashire. Briggs was told he was not a red-ball player, but played a key part in Warwickshire’s Championship triumph of 2021.
There was also some curious recruitment in a hurry to cover departing players, with a succession of experienced, imported players paid handsomely and a revolving door of expensive overseas players, too. In Sussex’s golden years, they did not just have a great culture, but they were well-run, with smart strategy and recruitment (Ed Joyce chose Sussex over Nottinghamshire in 2009, an idea that is virtually unthinkable now).
The handling of the departures upset the players as much as the departures themselves; most took pay cuts elsewhere; some say they fell out of love with the game in the final months of the season, and considered premature retirement; some were disappointed not to be invited to the end of season dinner in their final year, and the curt statements that signalled their departure; one says he even paid to get out as toxicity reigned. It is not just players who were treated poorly; the name of former batting coach Jason Swift pops up in dozens of conversations about those with reason to be peeved with their handling by the club. Some feel sympathy for Salisbury, too, believing the hierarchy had decided long before the Carson issue reared its head that he had to go. That is a feature of Sussex in recent years; sources have suggested they felt the club decided to get rid of them before finding their reason for doing so. All these departures bemused supporters, and incensed former players like Prior and Chris Adams. Certainly, it is hard to think of a county with a worse connection with its former players than Sussex right now.
Andrew and Greenfield are the subject of much chagrin, but the criticism of the pair differs. Greenfield is a local lad who played for the club in the 1990s, then stayed. He is credited by many academy products as a key reason for their ascension to the professional game, but is painted as out of his depth in his current role.
Keith Greenfield
Filby believes that Andrew receives greater criticism because he is a well-known public figure. That may be true, but there was plenty of criticism for his work as a rugby administrator, too, and there are few kind words spoken about his rugged approach to dealing with people at Sussex.Communication has been a consistent cause for complaint among those who deal with the county. “Everything at Sussex is cloak and dagger, and so often dishonest,” says a former player. Of Andrew and Greenfield, another former player says: “One is a hapless survivor. The other is a cynical survivor. Either way, there’s been a pattern of incompetence.” It is not just former players who believe all is not right at Sussex. Agents say they would break with convention and avoid the CEO and director of cricket because they have been so difficult to deal with, while the Professional Cricketers’ Association is understood to consider Sussex their club of most concern. Telegraph Sport contacted Sussex about allegations that Andrew and Greenfield have been difficult to manage, but the pair declined to comment.
In his end-of-season video, Andrew also spoke about the mountain of injuries suffered by Sussex’s bowlers, and he is right, there is some mitigation for their poor record this year. At some points in the early season, they had just 11 players available, even after scratching around in the loan market. They were without Ollie Robinson, Jofra Archer, Steven Finn, George Garton, Fynn Hudson-Prentice, and Carson for most if not all the season.
The pitches at Hove have been among the flattest in the country, at the coaches’ request, because they believe that such surfaces are the best way for bowlers to learn. Certainly, this year, the bowlers learned the hard way. The leading wicket-taker was 20-year-old Sean Hunt, with 19, overtaking Robinson (three matches) in the final game of the season. Even in the one match Sussex won, Derbyshire declared in the third innings, opening the door for a brilliant Orr century to carry Sussex home.
The pitches have helped the batters. Pujara, and to a lesser extent Mohammad Rizwan, were brilliant, while Tom Alsop proved a smart pick-up. Orr and Haines – both considered international prospects – made three centuries each, and averaged close to 50, scoring quickly too. Tom Clark and keeper Ollie Carter had their moments, while Charlie Tear and Dan Ibrahim have played for England Under-19s.
Tom Haines
One insider says that this group of players is talented, but perhaps no more than any other county’s crop: they have just had more opportunity. Opportunity can prove a curse. Those who experienced the dressing room this year say there was little pressure on the team to win, in the name of development, which acted as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Filby believes it was “over-optimistic to expect a team that young to perform”, while most former players feel sorry for a rudderless, green side. Haines has been thrust into the captaincy early, perhaps to the detriment of his promising batting. Big counties will be taking note, and not just of him.
Filby believes fortunes will change under a new coach. An appointment is thought to be imminent, with five candidates interviewed last week. No players have left this winter, so a rot has been stopped in one respect. Jayden Seales, the hugely-exciting young West Indies seamer, has been signed up for the first half of the season. “I am hugely positive about Sussex,” Filby says, when I ask what his message is to members. “We have good young players but I accept we need to improve results. We will improve. We will put together a coaching structure that can provide that. I’m only interested in looking forwards. There are so many good things to look forward to and I am determined that we will all enjoy those together.”
Hatchett has some optimism, but only if that coaching structure is right. There, some lessons have already been learned. The new coach will take charge all year round, not popping in for six months like Gillespie, and in charge of all formats, with James Kirtley, who ran the T20 team last year, now an assistant. It is understood that the head coach will take on some of Greenfield’s responsibilities as performance director, too, making it one of the broader remits in county cricket.
The aim is to develop more all-format players, with the likes of Orr and Haines replacing Ravi Bopara and Wright in the T20 team. The days of the “galaticos and franchise boys” are over. As far as Prior and many others are concerned, there can be no progress until Andrew moves on. “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results,” he tweeted on October 6. “At Sussex, we have sacked coaches and players, blamed them, thrown them under the bus and yet nothing has changed. When do you look at changing the CEO, 'performance' director [Greenfield] and the Board?” Andrew and Greenfield declined to comment.
A look at Sussex’s long history might provide hope. The late 1990s were a period of fracture and division that resulted in fan favourites leaving. In 2000, they finished 18th out of 18, and every Sussex fan knows what happened next. That is a reminder that even the bleakest periods can be fought through. This time, whether the mere change of a coach is enough remains to be seen.
