Head coach returns to county cricket after two decades, with a focus on high standards and no excuses
Andrew Miller17-Mar-2025The first thing that strikes you, on seeing Adam Hollioake in the flesh for what feels like the first time in two decades, is his breadth. He fills the doorway with the stature of a bouncer, a neck the size of an average person’s waist, and a gruff Aussie voice that is the very epitome of no-nonsense.”G’day … Adam Hollioake,” he intones, as if any sort of introduction is necessary. Despite his long years away from English cricket, it’s striking how ubiquitous he remains – for his stature, his back story, and his litany of achievements, most of them as captain of one of the great Surrey teams, but also as one of the great leaders that England didn’t quite have.And now he’s back, after 20 extraordinary years of self-imposed exile in Australia, as head coach of Kent – a fact that seems to have caught him as much by surprise as it did the rest of English cricket, when word of his appointment first circulated in December.”The way I’ve lived my life, I’ve kind of … what’s the right word? … free-styled, and just accepted whatever’s come my way,” he says in Canterbury, on the club’s pre-season media day. “I’ve just seen where life’s taken me, and in this instance, it has brought me down here today. I don’t know why, because the crowd always hated me down here. So not sure why God’s sending me down this way, but he’s done it.”Hollioake’s referencing of his faith is fleeting but instructive. Twenty-three years ago this week, English cricket was rocked by the death of his brother Ben, in a car-crash in Perth, and Adam’s own world was turned upside-down. The journey he’s since been on has seemed, from afar, like his personal Calvary. He’s accumulated his scars like badges of honour – including those earned during his brief pivot to cage-fighting – while the collapse, in the mid-2010s, of his £13 million property empire was another crushing experience that, if nothing else, reinforced that vital recognition that real life is what happens away from the field of play.Hollioake’s CV includes a brief stint as an assistant coach with England in 2017•Getty Images”Everyone always says your school years are the best years of your life,” he says. “I don’t think so. I’m 53 now and the best years of my life were playing professional cricket. Those years come and go very quickly, so make the most of it, give it your best shot, enjoy it along the way because, at the end of the day, it is just a game.”Whatever we do in life, some things are transferable back into cricket. When I went into fighting, everybody said, ‘what’s cricket and fighting got in common?’ And it turns out there’s a lot of things, like discipline, controlling your arousal levels, preparing and getting yourself into the right shape for an event. It just emphasises to me that there is a process to go through to have success back here in cricket, which is where I began.”I’ve always felt like my destiny is to be a head coach, but my first priority over the last decade has been bringing my children up,” he adds. “The most important thing in life was to be a dad and give them the best start in life, but now I’ve got to the point where, thankfully, they’ve left [laughs]. Now it’s my opportunity to bring on some of these guys and hopefully turn them into better players and better men. And do some stuff for myself.”Related
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Perhaps it’s glib to make the comparison, but the parallels with England’s unveiling of Brendon McCullum in 2022 are striking. Each man arrived in their respective roles with little by way of a conventional coaching CV – McCullum had before never overseen a red-ball team, while Hollioake is embarking on his maiden head-coach role – and each entered a dressing-room that was visibly down on its luck.”I know about Bazball and I love the idea of Bazball,” Hollioake says. “I haven’t analysed in depth what his message is with the England team, but I like it, so if you’re comparing me, that’s a compliment.”When I saw it, I thought ‘this is really smart’, not because tactically it’s wise, but what it does is remove the fear of failure which, historically, English players are handcuffed by.”That certainly seemed to be true for Kent in a grim 2024 campaign. Their relegation in the County Championship was compounded by a rock-bottom finish in the T20 Blast South Group. But, if there’s any sense that the players are still feeling sorry for themeslves, then as Sam Billings, their T20 captain, acknowledged, a 10-minute chat with the new coach is as likely as anything to snap them out of it.”I don’t necessarily deserve respect. I’ve got to earn that every day, just like when I was [Surrey] captain,” he says. “I’ve no idea what they did last year, I don’t concern myself with the past. It’s just about turning up with a good attitude, wanting to play hard and work hard. If that’s a shift, then they were obviously doing something wrong in the past.Hollioake (left) with his mixed martial arts coach Stephen Ng”What I can do is be clear with my messaging, and the standards that I expect. Just simple things like the state of the balls we were warming up with. We had white balls, red balls, old balls, new balls, all in the same bag. Our kit was all over the place. The standards of what we expect was just not good enough.”We need to respect ourselves and expect more from the club. If that message is helping them, then great. If it’s not, then they’ll learn.”Although Hollioake’s appointment has brought with it a tangible level of excitement and interest, it’s also hard to ignore the realpolitik at play where clubs such as Kent are concerned. They are due their share of the Hundred windfall, as and when Surrey complete their negotiations with their new partners at Oval Invincibles, Reliance Industries Ltd, but that deal in itself merely exacerbates the sense of them and us that is a growing feature of English professional sport.Hollioake, however, has a terse opinion of such navel-gazing. “The first thing we’ve got to do is stop using that as an excuse,” he says. “Money can be important, but it doesn’t mean that if you haven’t got it, you can’t be successful. I’m happy to acknowledge that sides like Surrey might have more money than us. That doesn’t give them a right just to come out and beat us. Hollywood’s littered with stories of underdogs. So let him make some movies about us.”It’s a variation on a theme he has encountered before – back at Surrey, no less, who had waited 18 long years for a County Championship title until Hollioake helped guide them to three in four years from 1999 to 2002, plus four further white-ball trophies.”We had a big excuse culture back then,” he recalls. “It was like ‘everyone cheats and changes the pitches against us’, or ‘the umpires don’t like us’. I find that when you start complaining or moaning about stuff, it gives you an excuse to lose. It’s subconsciously giving yourself a soft way out, or you can use it as a motivation. Certainly in my time at Surrey I did. I was like, ‘everyone hates us. Good!’ Let them hate us. I don’t care. We’re not here to be liked.”It’s the same here. No one’s going to look back in a hundred years’ time, and look at who won the Championship or T20 cup, and say, ‘well, how much money did you have?’ You don’t. It’s all about who wins.””We’ve got 11 guys that go out on the pitch. Two fists, one heart. They’re the same as the opposition.”
