Former England opener Michael Carberry criticised the national team's management, especially the current director of men's cricket, Ashley Giles, for "abysmal" treatment handed out to him near to what turned out to be his last days as an international cricketer.
Carberry played six Tests, five of which came during the disastrous 5-0 whitewash in Australia on 2013-14 trip, and also turned up in six ODIs and a standalone T20I.
"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 (Ashes) went the way it went, and it wasn’t just my doing that we lost. Actually, to be honest I think I ended up (being England's) second top run-scorer. Look, at nearly 35 or whatever I was, I needed to know, ‘Where am I going with this?’"
Giles, former left-arm spinner, was England's white-ball coach at the time.
"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'."
"There was too much of that for me in the set-up at the time. Coaches worrying about their own job rather than doing their job as a a coach, which is to inform their players as to where they stand, and that’s all I wanted to know. I know you can’t guarantee me that I’m going to play, I just want to know am I close or am I not," added Carberry, who had made his limited-overs debut in September 2013 versus Ireland.
After the tour finished, Carberry was considered dispensable to the Test side, when really everyone struggled against the pace scare of Mitchell Johnson. In an interview with the Guardian at the time, he said he heard "nothing (from selectors and the management) – which is disappointing but it’s the way they tend to do things. I don’t think it’s me alone saying this sort of thing. There have been players before me and players now who have felt the same thing."
Carberry revealed one more incident of bad treatment when he was asked about his absence from the squad by a journalist back home.
"A completely new team had been picked to tour the Caribbean (2014). I actually saw them out there because I was on pre-season tour with Hampshire, and I wasn’t in it. 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’, Graham Thorpe who was batting coach and who I knew from my Surrey days came over to try and console me a bit, said ‘Look mate, I’m sorry’.
"Ashley Giles just scarpered. Didn’t bother coming over, Just left. So that stuck in my mind. So when asked by this journalist, I’m not the kind of person to… I speak my mind, that’s what I do."
The 39-year-old thinks he rubbed the English team management the wrong way by questioning Kevin Pietersen's contentious exit from the set-up in the aftermath of the disastrous Ashes campaign during the aforementioned interview.
"If the England hierarchy got offended, it was more than that because I was slinging mud with them on Kevin Pietersen," he said.
"It was amazing they didn’t mention that they tried to accuse me and Kevin of having a fight or an altercation and yet to this day no one has phoned me to ask about this, but I have no knowledge of this fight, and neither did Kevin. There’s a lot more to this story than what came out."
(Inputs from CricketNext)
