Charlotte Edwards

After an Ashes humbling and a complete leadership reset, Charlotte Edwards was the exceptional head coach candidate to lead England out of their current rut.

“Let’s get going girls, come on!”

Speaking to Wisden last year, Charlotte Edwards takes a brief break from answering questions to shout at a group of Southern Vipers players.

“I have to be the timekeeper,” she explains in a lower voice. “If people don’t move at my pace I get a bit… Anyone that knows me, I’ve set out a structure for training and if they don’t stick to it I get really shitty with them because it’s part of how we operate here. I want us to be efficient and I don’t want us to be wasting time. I programme everything for every single training.”

Breaking off for a minute she checks her pockets to see if she can find her written plans for training sessions. “I must have left it over there, but I’m a bit of a stickler for timing.”

Throughout our 15 minute chat, Edwards – though forthcoming and engaged in the conversation – looked desperate to get back to direct oversight of her charges, regularly turning her head away from the microphone to watch a player run in. As the interview passed 10 minutes, she checked her watch, pointedly pulling her sleeve up before looking back to the nets while answering.

Timing has been the essence of Edward’s coaching career over the last three years. After winning the cup with her own name on it as Southern Vipers head coach in 2022, she was the heavy favourite to take the vacant England job when Lisa Keightley stepped down.

Despite backing from players and pundits to take over at that time, she publicly ruled herself out. “I don’t think it’s right for me now,” she said, speaking on Sky Sports coverage of an England international. “I’ve got quite a long time to coach England and I’m still quite young… A big part of my planning was to go to the Big Bash and do a team out there, and that felt like it was part of my process to go into international cricket, and that’s still the plan.”

There was also an undercurrent of the proximity of the job to Edwards’ own playing career coming to an end – the core playing group in 2022 had changed little from the one she had been ousted from in 2016 over the intervening years. While that’s still true in the present day, she’s now been out of the formal England set-up for nine years.

So, Jon Lewis, who had no previous experience in the English women’s game or as a senior head coach, came into the job. While Lewis enjoyed an energetic start to his tenure, leading a revitalised side in the West Indies and the 2023 T20 World Cup, Edwards continued on her own plan.

She coached Sydney Sixers to the final of the WBBL in her first year, and months later, led Mumbai Indians to the inaugural WPL title. As England launched their memorable Ashes comeback over the 2023 summer, Edwards won the double with the Vipers and made it a triple with Southern Brave in The Hundred. Over a two-year period, she was the most decorated domestic head coach in world cricket.

As England’s results and public perception took a nosedive during the T20 World Cup and Ashes series over this winter, Edwards’ rise continued. Directly after England’s shellacking in Australia, she coached Mumbai Indians to their second WPL win, which was built on an outstanding performance from England’s best player, and favourite to become their new captain, Nat Sciver-Brunt. Days after Edwards watched her side lift the trophy, Lewis was sacked, and the only name floated as a realistically possibility to replace him and lead England out of their rut, was Edwards.

*****

While Edwards has made the most of the opportunities for head coaches the rapidly expanding franchise circuit has to offer, her primary focus has always been in Southampton, at the club where she finished her playing career and took her first coaching job.

“I don’t miss a trick, and they know that,” said Edwards in 2022. “I’m in constant contact with all of the coaches on a daily basis and the players very much know that I might be away but I’m never forgotten about… I’m so lucky, I’ve got so many great people at the club that when I’m away I feel completely secure that everyone is going to be looked after but I check in every day.

“They’re probably fed up with me. But I make sure every session is going to plan and players are doing what we expect of them. If they’re not they’ll get a call from me to say, come on, you need to be better. Or they’ll get a nice call to say you’re doing a great job.”

Vipers finished the regional era as the dominant side. Over the four years of their existence, they won five titles and set the bench mark for the newly professional domestic women’s set-up. In contrast to her roles in the WBBL and WPL, the Vipers require a different skillset. The mix of young players, experienced veterans and those dipping in and out of the England set-up means she has to adapt her style to a varied group of players. While her franchise jobs require fast results building relationships over a short period of time, Hampshire is where her long-term qualities have been honed.

“They [Vipers] really develop me as a coach,” said Edwards. “At Sydney I’m working with a completely different group of players, a very experienced group who I’ve adapted my coaching style to slightly. Here [in Southampton] is a very hands-on coaching role because the players are younger and you need to develop and help them along the way.

“Sydney is a people management job where hopefully I just help them enjoy it and make sure they’re in a really good place. Mumbai is high energy, high pressure and a job that you have to do well in.... Everyone says, all the teams you coach, how do you get any time off? But I say they’re all so different that they require different aspects from me, and I think I’ve become very well rounded.”

Edwards’ success at the Vipers goes beyond trophies. Since the beginning of 2022, a third of England debutants across both white-ball formats have been coached by Edwards either in the Vipers set-up or in The Hundred.

“I think what Lottie drives at the top is key,” said Georgia Adams, who captains Southern Brave and the Vipers and made her England debut last year after averaging 50 in both regional competitions the summer before. “She’s just so honest, not brutal with it but everybody knows where they stand. There’s no grey area for any of us. I’ve learnt so much in the last few years from her from a leadership and a captaincy point of view and she’s a brilliant people person. She gets the best out of everyone in the group.

“I’ve always said she’s psychic and I do think she’s got a cricketing sixth sense. She’s just so passionate about the game and she’s got such a depth of knowledge of tactical awareness and strategies inside out.”

Adams’ thoughts were echoed by Maia Bouchier, who has been under Edwards’ wing at Southampton since signing for the Vipers in 2018, and broke into the England side across formats last year.

“Charlotte’s done such a fantastic job in creating that atmosphere and environment that you want as a professional cricketer,” Bouchier told Wisden after being named player of England’s T20I series in New Zealand last year. “All the domestic players who play for the Vipers, you can see how much they want to work hard and improve their skills and talk about it as well. One of the hardest things is talking about what you want to do and understanding that that’s a big part of the game. But she’s created such an amazing environment to be able to get the best out of our players.”

*****

Sitting in the Lord’s media centre less than 24 hours after being announced as head coach, Edwards embodied the same no-nonsense attitude she’d shown on the sidelines of the nets in Southampton 12 months before. Speaking bluntly to the media, she outlined the areas she saw as crucial to the side’s development, from fitness to increased volume of domestic cricket, while also explicitly stating the most important part of her role.

“I’m under no illusions, I’ve come into this role and it’s about winning.” said Edwards. “I think as coaches, we’re sometimes too scared to say we want to win. That’s our job, my job is to win games of cricket.”

The years of experience and success Edwards has built up since her own exit from the professional game made her quite literally the only candidate for the job. Clare Connor, the ECB’s managing director of England women’s cricket, confirmed Edwards was the only person they considered for the role after coming up with the criteria following the Ashes defeat.

Beyond her track record, there are other qualities that made Edwards the outstanding candidate. England experimented with picking a head coach without extensive knowledge of women’s cricket in 2022. Their Ashes review clearly showed the need for a coach with, in Connor’s words, “a forensic understanding of the women’s game domestically and internationally”.

Questions over fitness and scrutiny dogged England across the winter, exacerbating an already bruising series in Australia by souring public perception of their professionalism. The hope will be that Edwards’ experience in women’s set-ups as both a player and coach will make her adept at having the tough conversations necessary.

“I will make the players more accountable for fitness,” said Edwards. “I want to engage with more female coaches within the England team, that's something I'm really committed to doing. Also on certain tours, in certain environments bringing consultant coaches in to actually support the team because I think it's a really good thing to get different people into the environment to keep it fresh.”

‘Fresh’ neatly captures the mood of Edwards’ appointment. While deftly skirting around criticism of the old regime, she set out a clear ethos of how she wanted to move England forward. She epitomises both a symbolic figurehead of a side linked so closely to her own identity, and a hands-on coach eager to take a firm hold of a group of players currently lacking in direction.

But expectations of what she can deliver in the short-term should be tempered. All of the problems that were exposed in Australia still exist, and England are facing a World Cup in India in six months time where their issues against spin and playing in knockout games will be tested again. Edwards may well be effective in improving aspects of performance, but structural issues will be slower to change.

Despite her protestations that England’s domestic set-up is “better than Australia’s”, there’s still a blockage in the pipeline of players coming through to realistically challenge for international honours. The playing group Edwards’ inherits are either lacking in baseline experience outside international cricket, or under no realistic threat to their place. With the new county set-up weeks away from getting underway, it will take time for the benefits of that development to be felt at a higher level. While Edwards was the exceptional candidate for the job, her appointment cannot fix the deep-rooted structural issues that underpinned a hell-ish winter.

For now, however, the short term is what Edwards must focus on. She has six weeks before her side’s first outing under her command against the West Indies. India will be a tougher challenge later in the summer, and a return to winning will go a long way to getting the public back on their side. She also has a captain to appoint, squads to select and county cricket to get round before England appoint a women’s national selector.

If Edwards was the busiest head coach in the women’s game before packing it in to focus on a single job, the next two months will be another step up as she embarks on her second era as England’s commander in chief.

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