Ian Bell interview: ‘I want to coach England – but only when I am ready’

The idea of Ian Bell coaching young cricketers is an alluring one. Imagine a world full of cricketers with cover drives as graceful as his.

The former England batsman is indeed coaching anywhere that will have him, and he is making a name for himself for those exploits. He does not want his coaching career to be built on an illustrious playing career that included 118 Tests, 22 hundreds, five Ashes wins – the equal most by an Englishman – but on solid coaching foundations.

“An important thing for me is to be seen as Ian Bell, the coach,” he tells Telegraph Sport. “Inevitably there will be people who remember me as a player. But I want to earn my stripes as a good coach, not just getting there on the basis of what I did as a player.

“I want to do the hard yards. I don’t want to be given something on the back of my playing career. The wealth of experience I can pass on is huge, and I want to use it, but I want to earn the right to use it because of my coaching too.”

It is for this reason that Bell has become cricket coaching’s busiest man since his playing career ended in 2020. He is speaking the day before he flies to Australia for his final assignment of a non-stop year, with Melbourne Renegades in the Big Bash. In the past year alone, he has coached England Lions in red and white-ball cricket, Derbyshire in the County Championship and Vitality Blast, Birmingham Phoenix in the Hundred, at the T10 league in the UAE, and as an assistant for New Zealand on tours of England and Bangladesh.

“When I retired from playing I knew I wanted to coach, and I had already done a bit with England U19s while still playing,” the 41-year-old explains. “My view was that for a few years I wanted to get around as many different environments as possible, with as many players and coaches as I could. Try to get some clarity about me as a coach, what I stand for. Then, if and when a full time role comes up, you are ready to go.

“I have tried to avoid the environments I am familiar with as much as possible, to challenge myself,” he says. “I like that feeling of walking into a new dressing room. Say in Australia, where you are really having to earn people’s respect and earn the right to their attention.

“Take Derbyshire. One of the main reasons there was working with Mickey Arthur, who has been an international coach for 20 years, [and] has amazing experience. That gave me another perspective on the English domestic game too. I’d only ever played at Warwickshire, so I understood a place like that: Test venue, big county. Warwickshire were mainly in Division One, I was away often playing for England. But it’s been good to work at a non-Test ground, the things they face and to see what the players want. Even in county cricket, there are some very different models.

“Derby also allowed me to work in first-class cricket. A lot of the opportunities available to coaches are in franchise cricket, and that provides great experience. But I want to coach at Test level, and feel it would be good to know how to run a red-ball team. But it would be naive not to get a really good understanding of the franchise game, and where that is going.”

Sights on the England job

In the central-contracts era, no Englishman has made a major success of coaching England, with the best times coming under the likes of Andy Flower, Duncan Fletcher and now Brendon McCullum. Bell is clear that he would like to end up coaching the national team, after being a head coach at a lower level first, and believes the best shot at success is to be as much of a global cricketing citizen as he can be.

“I have ambitions to be an international coach,” he says. “Hopefully with England, but I’d love to do another international team too.

“I have seen players I’ve played with jump straight into [head] coaching roles and not get it quite right. Starting your coaching career is just like when you start your playing career. You invest in experiences, like playing club cricket in Australia, you learn along that journey. That’s what I’ve been trying to do. Get that clarity in assistant roles so that if I become a head coach, I am ready.

“The aspiration is to be a head coach at the right time, not to rush things, try to really be clear, so when the opportunity comes I will be really ready.

“I am trying to take a little bit from everyone I work with. Andy Flower was brilliant, but he’s probably even better now than he was when I was coached by him, because the world has probably changed a little bit, we communicate differently from 10 years ago. I enjoyed working with Stephen Fleming, with all his experience of the IPL, when I was with New Zealand too. Equally, it’s very rewarding working with a guy like Rachin Ravindra and then seeing him perform so well.”

‘I am not a big fan of talking technique’

What, then, is the ‘Bellball’ coaching philosophy?

“One of the things I always wanted was a calmness,” he says. “Try to be as calm as possible.

“It’s about having all the technical coaching knowledge, but knowing how and when to deliver it. That is the skill really. It’s about marrying that with managing people.

“I’m not a massive fan of talking technique too much when you’re in the middle of a series or season. That’s a competing time. There might be little things you keep your eye on, but at that time it’s about getting your mindset right. Obviously if there is a window to get technical work in, you take it. Coaching U19s is a very different experience to working with someone like Quinton de Kock, as I will be with the Renegades in the next few weeks.

“The higher up you get, the more it’s about taking pressure away from players. You don’t want to add pressure to international cricketers by throwing technical ideas at them constantly. That’s overloading and won’t get the right results.

“I try not to coach people to bat like me. I work with players to see what their strengths are. We see everyday that there are so many different ways to be successful, from Steve Smith to Virat Kohli, Kane Williamson and Joe Root. I don’t go in there and say I did this, you have to do that. You look at their strengths, and hone in on them. As a player, you have to be so comfortable in your own skin. I push that hard, especially with youngsters.

“I might have been perceived as a stylish player doesn’t mean it came easy, I spent a lot of time with my coach Neil Abberley as a youngster, working on my technique to make it as simple as possible. It was one of those things: you didn’t want people to think you weren’t trying as hard as people who didn’t make it look as nice, but it could happen occasionally.”

Just as making batting look that pleasant required a lot of hard yards, so does coaching. Bell is prepared to put them in to get to the top.