Posted by There are ways, dude. You don’t wanna know about it. Hell, he can get you the Haseeb Hameed you always imagined by three o’clock this afternoon.
There are pluses and minuses to the coaching of Peter Moores, who has just taken Nottinghamshire to the 2025 County Championship title. It’s just that that wider public perception still only really takes in the latter. That can happen when you don’t make a great success of being England coach… on either occasion.
Lie back and think of England
The case against is, to be fair, compelling. Moores’ first stint as England coach ended due to a fall-out that also resulted in the ‘resignation’ of his captain. His second stint was derailed by a World Cup so horrific that Eoin Morgan was instructed to tear up the team and start again.
At the same time, the captain he fell out with was Kevin Pietersen and he was given just a few short months to prepare for that 2015 World Cup. He was also asked to do so alongside Alastair Cook – a wholly inappropriate but initially bulletproof one-day captain who had been not so much named as anointed.
We once described attempts to construct that 2015 one-day side as being like trying to lay paving slabs around a dead tree stump. It wasn’t just the obvious problem. Everything else had to be moved around to accommodate it. Failure was assured.
The only Test series Moores got second time around was a drawn tour to the West Indies, which doesn’t seem so dreadful.
Moores good than Harm
It’s not hard to think of achievements either. Halfway through a tour of New Zealand, he unexpectedly ditched Steve Harmison and Matthew Hoggard and brought in as his new opening bowler, a young Lancashire seamer who’d been drifting through his career bowling at a single stump during lunch breaks. That decision worked out okay.
The other lad who came into the side for that Test turned out half-decent too. Those were pretty significant decisions in the grand scheme of things.
Moores also brought in Matt Prior and Graeme Swann, as well as the man who would ultimately benefit from all these additions – Andy Flower.
Moores has always been good with young players, which is a large part of the reason why he’d already won two County Championships with Sussex and another with Lancashire before this latest one.
No has been
Which brings us to Haseeb Hameed, lost cricketer of the 2010s – still a young cricketer really at 28 and certainly so when he first joined Moores at Nottinghamshire in 2019.
Everything unravelled for Haseeb Hameed at Lancashire. By the end, man management amounted to completely random deployment of carrot and stick – often alternately from one sentence to the next. The gentle arm around the shoulder that he needed would then constrict around his neck, before morphing into a hug and then they’d drop him to the ground and shout at him.
His game went wrong and no-one knew what to do, so they tried everything, all at once, and obviously things only got worse.
From there, Hameed could quite easily have drifted out of the game altogether. He was playing for the second team to such little effect that Lancashire released him. Moores acknowledged he’d had difficult times when his signing for Notts was announced, but added that, “the ones that are destined for great things bounce back and move their games on again.”
Moores can spot a good young player and he knows how to support them. Publicly, at least, he has dealt with Hameed very straightforwardly. He has been unfailingly effusive whenever he has spoken about him and by 2021, he was already vice-captain for the Championship and captain of the one-day side.
Now Hameed’s led his county to the title and has done so as the second-highest run-scorer in the first division with 1,253 runs at 65.94, including four hundreds.
Worse players and worse coaches have received more plaudits.
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