Andrew Strauss is currently filling the managing director position on an interim basis, but has repeatedly said that he has no wish to return to the role he previously did between 2015 and 2018 because of his family circumstances. Instead, Strauss is leading the search for a replacement.
The new managing director will face a busy in-tray. England do not currently have a head coach, with separate head coaches for the red and white-ball sides likely, and have also been without a national selector since Ashley Giles, the former managing director, abolished the role last year.
Key has previously indicated that he believes that England should have both split head coaches and a separate national selector.
“In this new era, we will probably go for a split coaching set-up with one coach for Test cricket and one for white-ball cricket, while we’ll probably have some form of selection panel back,” Key said on Sky Sports in January. He was heavily critical of Giles’s decision to invest so much power in Chris Silverwood, who combined being head coach in both formats with the selector, saying that Silverwood was “given an impossible task”.
A series of strong candidates for the role have either withdrawn, as in the case of North, or declined to apply, as in the case of Alec Stewart, Ed Smith and Mike Hesson.
This has left Key as the strong favourite, barring a surprise candidate emerging late on in the application process.
Although the job could be done by a figure from beyond the sport, the recruitment process has indicated a clear preference for those with a cricket background. Consultants at SRI Executive are leading the recruitment process, with the job specifications describing “international and/or first-class county playing experience” as “desirable”.
The new managing director will be strongly involved in the forthcoming high-performance review of English cricket, led by Strauss.
“There’s a lot of speculation around… there’s a lot of jobs up for grabs in English cricket,” Key said when asked about the role of managing director recently. He joked: “The thing I have is that you have to weigh up how much golf you can get in doing some of these.”
