Championship-winning coach returns to Chelmsford after eventful eight years on international circuit
Andrew Miller18-Feb-2025Chris Silverwood has been on a journey. “Just a little one!” he admits, as he sits – appropriately enough – on board a cruise ship in the Thames, to discuss the circumstances of his return to Essex after eight eventful years on the international circuit.They say never go back. And yet, despite his high-profile stints with England and Sri Lanka in the interim, in many ways it is as if “Spoons” never entirely left the club at which he made his name as a head coach.When he relinquished his role at the end of 2017, having in the space of two seasons guided Essex back to the top flight and then to their first County Championship title in 25 years, Silverwood bequeathed to his then-deputy Anthony McGrath a self-sustaining squad that would land a memorable double in 2019, then the Bob Willis Trophy in the Covid summer of 2020.Even now, with Surrey having flexed their muscles on the way to three Championships in a row, Essex remain one of the country’s pre-eminent red-ball outfits, with top-four finishes in each of their last three campaigns. Certain key figures have moved on, notably the retired Alastair Cook and the golden child of that first stint, Dan Lawrence. But Jamie Porter and Sam Cook, whom Silverwood blooded in that 2017 title run-in, remain as stalwarts of an ever-potent seam attack, alongside other key senior pros such as Tom Westley, Nick Browne and Simon Harmer.Related
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“I’m really proud,” Silverwood says, as he reflects on the extent to which the structures he put in place have held up for the best part of a decade. “Ever since I left, I’ve never stopped following, but I think I’ve been away long enough to come back and see things with fresh eyes.”Mags continued to drive what we put in place, and we have punched above our weight. What we have to do now is make sure we can continue to do that for many years to come. There’s still that senior core there, which is great, but equally, there’s a lot of fresh faces for me to work alongside as well and help bring through. So I think from that perspective, it’s very exciting.”For all the familiarity he brings, it’s an older and wiser Silverwood who will be taking guard for his second innings at the club. It was a “no-brainer” to come back – “You say I’m a proud Yorkshireman but Essex is home” – and with two of his boys already in the player pathway, he has an additional investment in the club’s coaching structures.But he’s seen some sights in his time away. His stint with England was famously ill-starred, and collapsed in ignominy on the Covid-blighted 2021-22 Ashes tour, where his own ten-day isolation during the Sydney Test epitomised the helplessness that engulfed his regime. And though he leapt almost immediately into the vacant Sri Lanka role for a two-year tenure, his fortunes in that role were similarly mixed. Though he was credited for a welcome uptick in the country’s fast-bowling stocks, two poor World Cup campaigns, including a group-stage exit at the 2024 T20 version last June, sealed his fate.”There’s always things you’re going to look back on and say, we could have done that differently,” Silverwood says. “But at the time, you do things for what you think are the right reasons, and you learn from them. So I don’t hold any animosity or any grudges, or anything like that. You put it down to experience. Has it helped me grow as a person? Yes. Has it helped me grow as a coach? Definitely.”It’s easily forgotten now, given how it all ended, quite how much optimism had abounded in the early months of Silverwood’s tenure. “It all started so well, didn’t it?” he acknowledges, looking back on an upbeat tour of South Africa in 2019-20, in which many of the seeds of the subsequent Bazball revolution were sown.
“It’s not just a case of supplying cricketers for Essex, it’s about over-supplying. We don’t have the money to compete with the big Test grounds but what we can do is match them from a development point of view. That’s something that Essex is historically very good at”
England bounced back from a first-Test defeat at Centurion to win three on the bounce, with Ben Stokes’ command performance at Cape Town leading the way, and a host of young players – Ollie Pope, Zak Crawley and the now-forgotten Dom Sibley among them – all thriving in a nurturing environment that, within months, would be wrecked by the bio-secure strictures of Covid.”You could sit there and say, ‘what if?’ until the cows come home,” Silverwood adds. “At the end of the day, it’s pointless. But there were some good times in there as well. The South Africa trip was superb, some of the youngsters did really well and have obviously gone on and achieved what they have. I’ve still got friends in that dressing-room and I enjoy seeing them do well personally as well. I’m still an England fan.”Silverwood also acknowledges that he took on too much in his England role, specifically the national selector duties during Covid which, he admits, he would now avoid if he had his time again. Such over-reach wasn’t a problem in his Sri Lanka stint, however, which he says made him a more versatile coach, and more accepting of short-term wins when wholesale change was hard to come by.”I was a resident of Colombo for two-and-a-bit years, learning how to survive, operate and be successful in a different culture, which was a whole new big adventure for me,” he says. “I know how things work in England, but out there I was on my own, which was a bit of a blessing, because it forced me to dive into their culture and live it.”He credits his assistant coach, Naveed Nawaz, for getting many of his messages across – “at least until they got used to my accent!” – but despite some notable highs, including an innings win over Australia in Galle, and a gratifying victory over England at the 2023 World Cup, Silverwood accepts that his personal development during his Sri Lanka stint was perhaps more profound than that of the overall team.”Off the back of England, to get straight back on the horse again, so to speak, did me a world of good,” he says. “It was about learning that there’s many ways of doing things. We all love structure, but sometimes it’s all right to operate on the outside of that as well, because you can still get things done.Silverwood led Essex to the 2017 Championship title in his first spell at the club•Getty Images”It’s about knowing which battles to fight, and learning how to navigate someone else’s landscape,” he adds. “It’s always been part of my philosophy to find solutions – it’s what I started encouraging these guys to do when I first came into Essex – but I suppose it taught me to look in different areas, because you accept that some things are just not going to happen, or some things will happen slowly. So I suppose I worry about that a lot less now.”And now he’s bringing all that learning back to Essex, in time for a 2025 season that promises to be fascinating for all manner of different reasons.The recent Hundred sale has consolidated the sense that county cricket is now permanently split between the “have” and “have not” clubs, and seeing as London rivals Surrey and MCC, landlords at Lord’s, emerged as the biggest winners in that process, Essex have – on the face of it – many more reasons to question how their humble Chelmsford base can possibly keep them level-pegging with their noisy neighbours.And yet, Essex’s relevance in the grander scheme of English cricket received a huge boost last April, when they were unveiled as one of the eight inaugural Tier 1 clubs in the reconvened women’s professional set-up. Quite apart from the merits of the club’s well-tailored bid, which includes a commitment to hosting women’s home games at Chelmsford and a groundbreaking tie-in with the sports science department at the University of Essex, it was a vote of confidence in the club’s proven ability to harness and cultivate local talent – a trait that Silverwood’s original tenure set in stone.”It’s not just a head coach role now,” he adds. “It’s a DOC [director of cricket], so you’re making decisions for what’s best for the club, and how do we build a legacy that will keep them successful for a long time coming?”It’s not just a case of supplying cricketers for Essex, it’s about over-supplying. We don’t have the money to compete with the big Test grounds like Surrey, but what we can do is match them from a development point of view, and that’s something that Essex is historically very good at.”I want to see Essex boys and girls playing for Essex and going on to play for England. That is ultimately the dream, but if some of them go on and play for other counties, that’s great as well. It’s just making sure that we are tapping into our footprint within the community, whether it be into East Anglia or the Essex area, into East London, or wherever it may be, that we spread far and wide.”