LONDON — The England and Wales Cricket Board's decision to exclude maverick batsman Kevin Pietersen from selection has benefitted the team, director of cricket Andrew Strauss has told BBC. England's record run-scorer in all formats, Pietersen was sacked after a 5-0 whitewash in the 2013-14 Ashes series and was told in May by former captain Strauss that he would not be considered for an international recall. The team has simply “moved on,” said Strauss, who had a frosty relationship with the fellow South Africa-born Pietersen. “The danger at that time was that particular issue would overshadow everything that happened on the pitch over the course of the summer,” Strauss said. “What I was trying to do was provide clarity going forward so everyone knew where they stood. “I think the team has moved on and the team is in a pretty good place. Some of those young guys have established themselves and that's what we will be focusing on taking England forward,” he added. England won the Ashes 3-2 but trails 2-0 in the five-match one-day series going into Tuesday's third ODI at Old Trafford. Strauss also said that England needs to move on from its Ashes obsession and start to focus on new goals like improving its “consistently woeful” record in the one-day game. “We probably define our sense of worth too much by winning and losing Ashes series,” said Strauss. Test matches against Australia remain the pinnacle of cricket in England, which regained the urn this summer after the third Ashes series in two years. That's often to the detriment of the limited-overs formats, with England having never won the 50-over Cricket World Cup — or even reached the semifinals of the tournament since being runner-up in 1992. England is currently losing 2-0 to Australia in the tour-ending ODI series, which has failed to capture the public's imagination like the Ashes. “We need a fundamentally different focus on white ball cricket, one-day cricket and Twenty20 cricket,” Strauss said at the SoccerEx conference in Manchester, “because the game has been so geared towards Test cricket for decades and we've been consistently woeful in World Cups. “It's an issue we have in this country that the ODIs feel like after the Lord Mayor's show.” The next Cricket World Cup will be held in England in 2019. “I look at 2019 as an unbelievable opportunity to refocus and reshape the game in this country but it's also incredibly difficult because our game is not set up to do that,” Strauss said. “The game is evolving unbelievably quickly and T20 is exploding around the world and we can't afford to be left behind.” — Agencies
