Peter Moores

Listen to the tin!

Unsure how to approach opening the bowling in the Ashes?

Simply consult ‘the tin’.

“Jimmy does what it says on the tin – he swings it both ways at pace with the new ball.” – Peter Moores

The tin is clearly very wise.

Peter Moores: Lancashire coach

We support Lancashire. You might be wondering how we feel about this. If there’s such a thing as a positive ‘meh’ – then that. He did win the County Championship with Sussex after all. He does have a good track record.

Peter Moores’ has Maxonian origins, so this is a return to the North-West for him. We’ll all stand at the windows of the mills and doff our flat caps at him as he slopes back into town, hunched against the driving rain.

We’ll bake ‘welcome home’ meat ‘n’ tatty pies for him and call him a soft bastard for having something approximating a hairstyle. We’ll ask him if it’s true that you can’t get gravy wi’ your chips down south and then we’ll get on with the serious of business of buying him a pint so that he has to stand there and drink it while we tell him how shit he’s doing.

Kevin Pietersen and Peter Moores resign

Maybe we don’t need Pakistan cricket after all. We’ve got England for back-stabbing and intrigue now.

Officially, Kevin Pietersen and Peter Moores both resigned. Unofficially, well, does it matter what really happened, does it?

Those halcyon days of long-term planning under Duncan Fletcher seem longer ago and more valuable by the day. Not long ago, we looked at Australia’s selection policy and felt like maybe England were more organised. Now they have neither coach nor captain. Textbook. Well played England.

To a degree and for different reasons, both men deserve this. It’s said that Peter Moores didn’t acknowledge or allow for individuality in his players. Kevin Pietersen bought into his own column inches and threw his weight about.

Why have Peter Moores and Kevin Pietersen fallen out?

The seeds of the fall-out were sown during a conversation between Peter Moores and Andrew Strauss. The pair were discussing manufactured pop bands and Moores branded Liberty X ‘derivative’ and ‘lacking in true vocal talent’. As Kevin Pietersen is married to ex-Liberty X chanteuse, Jessica Taylor, Strauss felt moved to tell him about the comment.

Pietersen took it badly, saying: “He’s so two-faced. If I’ve got a problem with someone, I tell them to their face. I don’t go around behind people’s backs like he’s done.”

The discord simmered with Pietersen making continual wisecracks about Moores being from Macclesfield, even though he no longer lives there. Many of the comments were childish, revolving around inbreeding and an unseemly love of the produce of Gregg’s the bakers.

Following a stressful tour of India, matters came to a head in the form of a huge stand-up row between the pair.

Pietersen said that Moores was boring everyone with his continual complaints about the fortnightly wheelie bin collections in Macclesfield. Moores countered by saying that a non-Maxonian couldn’t know what it was like; that previously the bins had been emptied weekly, but now families couldn’t fit all their rubbish in the bins and it was lying around rotting, attracting vermin.

Pietersen called the people of Macclesfield ‘idiots’, citing the increased capacity of the wheelie bin compared to the old style bin that it had replaced. Moores said Pietersen was an idiot, before rather unnecessarily adding that Liberty X’s ‘A Night To Remember’ was inferior to the Shalamar original.

The relationship has been strained ever since.

Peter Moores talks balls

We mean that how you think we mean it. He’s not been going on about Kookaburras or whatever.

Talking about Andrew Flintoff Peter Moores said:

“When it gets tight he takes a deep breath and delivers his skills.”

Maybe that doesn’t bother you, but all sorts of alarm bells started ringing when we read it. After we’d turned them all off and returned to the computer, his choice of words sank in and we were MASSIVELY HORRIFIED.

‘Delivers his skills’ is, unfortunately, not Maxonian dialect. It’s cricket lingo. It just means ‘plays well’ and nothing more than that. It’s one of those phrases where people just seem to be trying too hard to sound professional or something.

We heard it first a couple of years ago when John Buchanan was Australia coach. At that time the whole Australia team had been brainwashed into speaking in this mindless way; forever going on about executing their skills like they were frigging robots or something.

It’s a bad sign. Mark our words.