London Spirit coach expects full Maxwell availability despite clash with Zimbabwe’s Australia tour
Warne is men’s head coach at London Spirit, whose last-placed finish in the Hundred’s inaugural season last year means that they have the first pick in the draft for the 2022 season. The draft, which will not be televised live, takes place on March 30, with the competition running from August 3 to September 3.
“We’ve got two £125k picks available,” Warne said on Sky’s The Cricket Show. “Glenn Maxwell accepted £100k to allow us to have that first pick at £125k and Eoin Morgan came down to £100k, so that frees us up to have the first and last picks at £125k, plus we’ve got two picks at £75k and two picks at £50k.
“The hardest thing at the moment is the internationals and the Future Tours Programme (FTP), looking at who’s available and who’s not. For Australia, for instance, I’ve spoken to the selectors. Australia play Zimbabwe in some white-ball cricket and I think it starts on August 28 at this stage.
Warne added that uncertainty over the FTP has made it difficult for teams to plan, and that he expects a “really difficult draft” because of the lack of clarity. “We just need to know what the international schedule is,” he said. “You don’t want to pick a player who’s going to play four or five games and then miss the back end because you might be there or thereabouts and then suddenly have to find a different mix and bring in another international.
“I’ve got scribbled out about eight names for first pick. There’s an additional overseas [player per squad] this year so you’ve got the four overseas, you’ve got the wildcard pick, you’ve got retention, plus a right-to-match [card]. It’s a bit like Sudoku, working out if all the pieces are going to come together.”
Warne has retained 10 players in total, including Zak Crawley and Mark Wood as centrally-contracted Test players, though thinks Crawley will only be available for “probably two or three games” and expects Wood to be “wrapped in cotton wool” ahead of England’s Test series against South Africa which starts midway through the tournament.
“We were really poor. We were terrible. It was disappointing from my point of view: I wanted to dip my toe in the water into coaching. It was fantastic to work with Eoin Morgan and to have that opportunity to see how he thinks about the game but I got Covid, so I missed five or six of the games.
“I’d like to think I was always a little bit ahead of the game, tactics and thinking-wise, but we couldn’t quite execute some of those things last year. This year, we’ve done a bit of a clean-out. We lost four games off the last ball or by a couple of runs… but the bottom line is we won one game. We came last, so I’m pretty annoyed about that.”