Top 45 Andrew Strauss Quotes

I loved captaining and trying to win games – but I wasn’t enjoying batting any more.

We’ve always got to look for opportunities for our English coaches to get more experience than just doing county coaching gigs. They need to do more than that if they’re going to be viable candidates for England jobs going forward.

I don’t want to overplay the diary’s significance, but it’s a really helpful batting aid. It’s not an obsession because I don’t spend more than 10 or 20 minutes writing a day – and not necessarily every day. I might write in it three days in a row and then not the next four. It depends on the situation.

I was forced to learn a lot about psychology as a player, and as a captain to get the best out of others. There’s still a lot of scepticism about it in sport and the workplace, but dealing with fluctuations of form, and pressure, and being away from home are more important than your cover-drive.

I’ve always felt that, in the past, there has been a teacher-pupil relationship between the management and the players. But the best teams are run in such a way that the players have a voice.

It’s always frustrated me when I’ve seen other players able to smack balls over the bowler’s head and stuff like that. I can’t, though. When I’ve tried I’ve let myself down.

You can’t compartmentalise everything but the more you do that the easier it is. Keeping a notebook is a good way of dealing with it. You can rest from any thoughts if you put them down on paper.

If you think about the practical difficulties of having a relationship with somebody on the other side of the world, it defies all logic.

And my job is to look at the future of English cricket and develop a side that is capable of winning important series and tournaments in the next four years. And that is what I am going to concentrate on doing.

I learnt that as soon as you have a negative thought, just push it to the back of your mind. The question is, when it’s you versus 11 others; can you be positive under pressure? That’s what defines winners.

If we broaden the audience for cricket, more people will be interested in all forms, then TV rights and sponsors and crowds will follow.

Captaincy is a confidence game. When the team is winning and your decisions go well that breeds confidence.

There is a real danger that kids won’t engage with cricket when there are so many other opportunities to use their time in other sports, not to mention video-gaming, and generally long-form cricket doesn’t turn them on.

I’ve known Nick Compton a long time. He’s a fully-formed cricketer and he’s scored lots of runs.

T20 has become a longer and longer format of the game. It is more than four hours in a lot of parts of the world.

I had to stop being a student idiot and become more sensible and organised and that definitely improved my batting. I also reacted far more quickly to situations in Test cricket because I’d been a county captain. It made a huge difference.

If you look at English cricketers since the turn of the century, less than a handful have better records away from home than at home. So if everyone in our team is significantly worse away from home, the likelihood is the team as a whole will be significantly worse.

I’m happy unless I’m not happy. And I think this is the thing with grief, there is no rhyme or reason to it and it’s been completely different to how I thought it was going to be.

A cricket team is always made up of 11 different individuals and you want to give them enough flexibility to be themselves.

I have to accept that my role is to gather the runs slowly. Kevin Pietersen is flamboyant, but that style doesn’t work for me.

I always thought we ought to recognise the blood, sweat and tears – and the sacrifices in being away from home – of former England players, and that current players should know what has come before.

You can rule by fear but it’s not a great motivation for people.

Winston Churchill inspired my leadership philosophy. I’ve read a huge number of his writings, especially his diaries from the Second World War. His thoughts on leadership and duty have helped me as England captain.

We are going to try and turn Lord’s red for the day as a testament to my wife Ruth, but more importantly as a way of increasing awareness and raising funds for the Ruth Strauss Foundation.

The way you speak to a team is very important – both before a Test and during the game itself. If you try and do things on the run then people will quickly see through you. You’re also never going to say anything that profound and so it’s important to come up with new angles.

We know the Victorian way of dealing with death, which was not dealing with it. You’ll never get over it but having the support of a counsellor who has been there hundreds of times is so important, to help you develop strategies to cope.

I’ve definitely grown into the job after that difficult first Test against Pakistan. I’d been captain for the Sri Lanka one-dayers, which hadn’t gone well, and all the talk was that I only had that one Test as captain.

People much prefer to feel part of something and that they’re appreciated and wanted, that their voice actually holds some sway, rather than just having someone barking orders at them.

When you’re managing a team the key is, I guess, to find where those boundaries are, where you’re prepared to let people go, to what extent you’re allowing them to be a free spirit because ultimately it’s all got to be in the greater cause which is making sure the team wins cricket games.

I think it’s hard for one coach to do all the formats all the time, and there are a limited number of coaches who have done the hard yards already. You can have head and assistant coaches for each squad.

In the cricket world, with a lot of little issues that people are getting in a tizz around, I’m just like: Don’t worry about it.

I still have ambition to captain England into the 2011 World Cup. I’m very keen to do that job.

My biggest concern is that Test cricket and Twenty20 cricket are competing too much. They should be complementing each other and the more they clash the more damaging it will be for cricket.

We have to find a way to get the two forms of the game co-existing – and that involves administrators sitting down and banging their heads together and working out a framework. I understand the politics but I’m more interested in what’s best for the game.

Peter Moores has been very popular in the England dressing room. He’s got a very good record of developing players but I felt that in some areas of international cricket he is a little bit exposed, around tactics and strategy.

I have to watch my language. I think a lot about the words I use in both the public environment and the dressing room. The language you use is a direct insight into how you are feeling.

Some people get on better with some than others but what is absolutely crucial is that everyone knows their roles and responsibilities and trust that your team-mate is going to do their best for the team.

I tie my wedding ring around my neck with an old shoelace. It’s to remind me of why I play cricket: for my family – my wife Ruth and my boys Sam and Luca.

I really believe that every game of international cricket should have some sort of meaning and some sort of context to it – so the World Test Championship, the World One-Day League are all really, really important opportunities to the game.

I can understand the argument that the captain should always be there to lead from the front.

We are a high-performance environment and guys being professional about how they prepare for games is not something that should be frowned upon. It should be expected of players.

This perception that a good captain is someone who beats his chest and roars like a lion and gives big Churchillian speeches, that’s just not what leadership is about for me.

I still remember my quote from the 2007 World Cup, when I said scoring two threes was as good as hitting a six. That was me trying to justify what you couldn’t. To me, and this was before I became director of cricket, we just couldn’t do that again.

Peter Moores has been very popular in the England dressing room. He’s got a very good record of developing players, but I felt that there are some areas in international cricket where he is a little bit exposed, for me personally around tactics and strategy.

In 50over cricket there are different ways of playing. It’s not all about smacking it over the top. It’s important someone bats through the innings. That would be one of the options for me.