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The Edge - England Cricket Documentary

Howe_zat

Audio File
Apologies if someone has aready started a thread on this, but it's got a title that doesn't lend itself well to the search function.

If you've never heard of it, it's about a subject quite close to my heart which is the rise and fall of the England team from 2009 to 2014.

I never watched it on release, mainly because it was quite hard to get hold of with no paid TV, but it was on BBC Two tonight and as such is now available on BBC iplayer, if you wanted a look.

I've just started watching and will probably post my thoughts on it properly in the morning. For now I just wanted to share this early shot of Ian Bell looking like he's a gritty scandinavian detective drama.

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Excellent stuff so far.
 
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ImpatientLime

International Regular
i'm surprised this didn't garner more attention when it first came out. i watched it a year or so back on prime and found it very enjoyable, if a little awkward viewing.

the bit that stuck with me was KP describing how there was next to no concern for steve finn's mental health and the expectation was you just go out there and hit that mark.

andy flower comes across as a massive tosser with little empathy for any of his players. a borderline sociopath.
 

BoyBrumby

Englishman
It's pencilled in as my viewing for this evening, so will add my thoughts later.

These kinda documentaries love a narrative of conflict though, so am intrigued to know if KP is alone in wearing a black hat or if (as one hopes) it's more nuanced than that.

IL's post suggests Flower's own headwear might be on the darker shade of grey.
 

wpdavid

Hall of Fame Member
Just watched it. In no particular order:
1. The narrator, or at least parts of his script, is really irritating
2. Most of KP's contributions are clearly jaundiced by his personal animosity towards Flower. Remember that KP wanted Flower to go as well as Moores when he got himself sacked as captain.
3. Yup, Flower is genuinely one very tough cookie. Having put his own life on the line by standing up to Mugabe with his very public protest in 2003, he probably didn't have the ability to sympathise with weaker souls. But he did also admit that he would do some things differently if he had that time again.
4. I'm still very happy with the job that Flower did for his first three years of his tenure. The team needed someone like him to sort them out, and it wasn't his fault if some of the egos were incapable of handling success as well as they should.
5. One can only feel sorry for how Jonathan Trott ended up feeling, and hopefully he's come through it now. I couldn't help thinking about Albert Trott taking his own life and being aware that mental illness can run in the family and even skip a generation or two. Not that it's 100% certain that they are related tbf.
6. I could have done without the shots of actors playing the players wandering through grassy meadows or drowning.
7. I really loved the 2009 and 2010/11 series.
8. Mixed feelings about Steven Finn. Sorry to hear how upset he was, but isn't mental toughness part of the game at this level? Obviously pleased that he seems OK now, but his career isn't what it should have been, and that's not Andy Flower's fault.
 
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Howe_zat

Audio File
I feel like the use of words like 'weak' and 'mental toughness' have deservingly become very dated and a big part of how we need to (and have begun to) move on, which this film does very well to emphasise.
 

wpdavid

Hall of Fame Member
I feel like the use of words like 'weak' and 'mental toughness' have deservingly become very dated and a big part of how we need to (and have begun to) move on, which this film does very well to emphasise.
I know what you mean, but I think it's a question of degree. I think that mental toughness is a requirement, but there certainly needs to be some sort of safety net for guys who aren't coping. And perhaps a recognition that it doesn't come in the same way to all players. Warner's comments about Trott after the Brisbane test in 2013 sound horrendous now, but I suppose he wasn't to know the extent of it, and it was part of the mind games that go on.
 

Howe_zat

Audio File
I don't think anyone comes across as a villain, except possibly a couple of noted Australians. I am happy with this.

As far as the main characters are concerned, they gave everyone that they spoke to a fair say. I'm glad that Flower admitted to how he regretted some of the way he handled players and I hope that's mainly referring to the 'boot camp' which honestly seems ridiculous and cruel. It was meant to bring the players closer together but given what was happening 2-3 years later that obviously didn't happen.

My other thoughts in no particular order:

The interviews are very honest and personal, and it's great to hear a few stories I'd never heard before, like the anecdote about Bresnan punching Flower and the fond recollections of Jonathan Trott being weird.

Speaking of, the timeline more or less makes this a story about Trott, and the film is happy to frame it as such. The result is an ongoing theme of examining the mental health of the players and it's absolutely heartbreaking. The perspective offered at times from Finn, Panesar and even Pietersen are enlightening as well.

The aformetioned camp included an exercise that involved throwing things at a picture of Mitchell Johnson, which is hilarious. It's not clear if there are other pictures of australian players to throw things at, whether this is a designated exercise or just something a few england players did for fun, or anything really. It just happens and is never explained in any way.

I didn't mind the more 'abstract' shots of cricketers in water or fields and the like, I get what they were trying to do, but perhaps it could have been done with a bit more subtlety.

I didn't like some of the fakery. The worst is fake Ian Botham punditry that pretends he's stood on a pitch criticising the team in 2009, but it's clear been put in after the fact to act as a sort of in-universe narration. Additional Ian Botham punditry is never necessary.

They simplified a lot of the ins & outs. The bulk of the team stayed the same from 2009 to 2014, they rose up in 2009-11 and fell down in 2012-13, and it tells that story reasonably enough. But it feels weird to omit things like the 2012 series in the UAE, for instance.

What's annoying is that you suspect that they are constructing the 'story' around what they happen to have footage or interviews for, and while everything else has probably been cut for time, it makes the whole thing feel more artificial. Is there a crucial part of the story told by Collingwood, for example, while you had no reason to mention Chris Tremlett or Eoin Morgan? Or is it just that you happened to get an interview with the former?

Overall I think I forgive it for its flaws. It's got something important to say and the way we treat players is definitely a thing worth thinking about. It gets emotional at times and I appreciate the candidness of the interviews. It shouldn't really be seen as a documentary on cricketing history because it's a documentary about psychology and offers a look at how the sporting stories we watch might appear from the other side.
 

wpdavid

Hall of Fame Member
I couldn't argue with any of that. I thought that the lack of any comment at all about Tremlett was very odd, especially when we saw clips of him bowling beautifully at the MCG. Onions was another, who's back-to-the-wall blocking helped us secure a draw in SA. I'd like to have seen more of the 2011 India series as that was when we reached number 1. And some perspective on the UAE debacle would have been interesting.

My take on Collingwood (and others) was that he provided a counter balance to the narrative, and actually lots of players coped perfectly well within the regime. Bresnan was another, and incidentally I can see how any dressing room would benefit from him being there.

A minor point of interest was the footage of Trott's final FC match in 2018, where the guy next to him in the slips was Dominic Sibley. There's something intelligent to be said there, but I'm not sure exactly what.
 

wpdavid

Hall of Fame Member
Is this readily available on Prime?
I think it's only available to buy or rent on prime.

It is on BBC iplayer, but I don 't know whether that includes your part of the world.
 

Burgey

Request Your Custom Title Now!
Cheers, will have a look to see if I can watch it here on either. Don't mind paying for it if I have to.

I found the one they did on the Australian side pretty illuminating tbh, but I know a number of folks on here didn't much like it.
 

BoyBrumby

Englishman
I enjoyed it.

Thought it was treading a careful line between having enough gristle for proper cricket fans to get their teeth into and exposition for non-diehards who may have been interested more in the human aspect, which it managed mostly successfully.

Flower seems a very old school, driven character. One imagines the Flower of the time period the docu covered having little truck with what he'd doubtless have described as touch, feely stuff. He clearly set very high standards for himself both professionally and ethically and expected little less from his charges. I wouldn't say he came across as a tosser as IL suggested, but he definitely seemed intransigent and, to his credit, he recognised this.

I thought Bresnan's anecdote about him was illuminating; I'm pretty sure a lot of coaches wouldn't have taken very kindly at all to being punched back by a player, so Flower responses of "Hey, I like you" doesn't seem that of a sociopath.

Bresnan came across very well, I thought. Seemed a genuinely good guy in his bluff, northern way. Kinda bloke you'd want in the trenches and a deeper thinker than I've previously given him credit for.

Swann must be a ****ing pain in the arse after a while because he's always "on", but the way he reacted to the boot camp shows the essential difference between him and Pietersen; the extroverted egotist and the introverted one, if you will.

Both very obviously thought it was bollocks (an opinion I have no little sympathy for; the whole enterprise was straight from "Manly teambuilding 101"), but Swann laughed it off and endured it, whereas KP added it to his list of real and imagining slights from Flower.

KP is obviously the massive outlier from the team in so many ways. As I hoped the show was nuanced enough not to have him twirling his moustache and tying James Taylor to a railway line, but it is instructive pretty much everyone said that he was the best player they played with or against, but no-one said what a good bloke he is. I'd also have liked to have heard a little about his "friends" in the media's contribution to textgate and his ultimate elbow after the 13/14 Ashes for a bit of context.

In fact, if any of the documentary's cast of actors showed sociopathic tendencies, my inexpert opinion is that it's Pietersen. His lack of empathy still somehow manages to shock even now. Either he genuinely can't see how others perceive him or he flat out doesn't care.

It was probably too brief; there were always going to be some glaring omissions in an hour and a half documentary covering 4 years of test cricket and there was likely more than enough material to cover six or eight hour episodes, but it mostly did a fair job of pouring a gallon into a pint glass.

I also thought it stitched Warner up slightly by including his (admittedly slightly ****ish, even at the time) statement about Trott's mental weakness that he made before it was known about the latter's depressive illness. A chance for Davey to reply might've been nice. One assumes he was not offered this as there was no "David Warner declined to be interviewed" disclaimer in the program.
 

Chubb

International Regular
andy flower comes across as a massive tosser with little empathy for any of his players. a borderline sociopath.
Andy Flower in being a Zimbabwean sports coach shock.

Note similarity with Duncan Fletcher. Reality is closer to Brumby’s analysis I suspect.

Recommend reading Alan Butcher’s book about his time in Zimbabwe - The Good Murungu - one of his biggest struggles is dealing with ex players, coaches and officials who can’t empathise with the players, have incredibly high and unrealistic standards and no self awareness.
 
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Pothas

Cricket Web: All-Time Legend
Speaking of, the timeline more or less makes this a story about Trott, and the film is happy to frame it as such. The result is an ongoing theme of examining the mental health of the players and it's absolutely heartbreaking. The perspective offered at times from Finn, Panesar and even Pietersen are enlightening as well.
This really worked for me, Trott's career trajectory is a really good way of telling the story of the team and he was in some ways the most important player in the side. His parts are obviously the most poignant but I also found the Strauss retirement quite affecting as well, he really did deserve to go out in a better way than that.

As others have said Bresnan just comes across so well.

Also poor old Ian Bell, he only got one line in the whole thing didn't he?
 

wpdavid

Hall of Fame Member
If anyone's interested, there's a piece in the Sunday Times about this, including brief chats with the guy who made the film and also with Trott. It's a good read if you get the chance.
 

SteveNZ

Cricketer Of The Year
Cheers, will have a look to see if I can watch it here on either. Don't mind paying for it if I have to.

I found the one they did on the Australian side pretty illuminating tbh, but I know a number of folks on here didn't much like it.
I enjoyed The Test, it did put a new spin on a few Australian cricketers for me. Tim Paine for one, massively up in everyone's estimations I'd say. And any time you get to see the projection of human perfection that is Pat Cummins, the better. The less said about the coach, however...I don't look away in cringey rom coms or soap operas but I did every time Justin Langer spoke.

Did we find out whether this one is on Prime to be paid for?
 

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