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‘The way they handled me was abysmal,’ Ex-England opener blames Ashley Giles for keeping him in dark
Carberry, who has played 14 Tests for England and was part of the 2013/14 Ashes squad, was ignored by Giles despite being one of the better performers.
Michael Carberry, the opener who played for England, has blamed Managing Director of ECB Ashley Giles for keeping him in dark and ruining his ODI career. Carberry, who has played 14 Tests for England and was part of the 2013/14 Ashes squad, was ignored by Giles despite being one of the better performers.
“There’s a right way and a wrong way to deal with people, and the way England handled me was abysmal, as far as I see it,” he said on the Broken Trophy Podcast. “The series went the way it went, and it wasn’t just my doing that we lost. Actually, to be honest I think I ended up second top run-scorer. Look, at nearly 35 or whatever I was, I needed to know, ‘Where am I going with this?’”
Even though England were whitewashed 0-5 by Australia, Carberry emerged as the second-highest run-scorer for the team - 281 runs from 10 innings – behind Ben Stokes. Yet, he never played a Test again for England. He was part of the ODI squad that was to play right after the Ashes, but despite Alastair Cook and Ian Bell managing just two half-century stands between them, Carberry continued to be ignored, leaving him frustrated.
“When it got to the last game I remember sitting down with Ashley Giles (England’s white-ball head coach at the time) and asking ‘Where am I going with this really? Am I close or not?’,” he said. “I got runs in the warm-up game, didn’t get a sniff. And he basically just palmed me off. ‘Ah I don’t really know. I’m not sure of my own job.”
The statement from Giles was enough to make Carberry feel unwanted and aware of the fact that the coaches were self-involved. Right after the disappointing Ashes series, when England toured West Indies for three ODIs and three T20Is, Carberry was sidelined, despite averaging 55.77 with a strike rate of 142.61 in the country’s most recent T20 domestic tournament. Carberry went on to play just twice more for England – an ODI and a T20I against Sri Lanka in May of 2014.
“A completely new team had been picked to tour the Caribbean. I actually saw them out there because I was on pre-season tour with Hampshire, and I wasn’t in it. I found it amazing that I could not make a team at the time that wasn’t winning,” Carberry said.
“I saw Ashley Giles out there, he saw me, all the rest of the guys came over, gave me a hug, said ‘Sorry you didn’t get in, we couldn’t believe it’. Ashley Giles just scarpered. Didn’t bother coming over, Just left. So that stuck in my mind.”
