James Thomas could have spent this month focused on a Premier League title race and a Champions League knockout tie against Real Madrid. Instead, he will spend Wednesday and Thursday sitting on the Birmingham Phoenix table at the Hundred’s inaugural auctions in central London.
It was a year ago that Thomas was appointed by Warwickshire to succeed Gavin Larsen as performance director, but he did not start in the role until June. Until then, he was serving his notice period at Manchester City, where he worked in a behind-the-scenes role as director of performance services with oversight for sports science, medicine, nutrition and data.
His appointment was a demonstration of just how quickly county cricket clubs have changed. A decade ago, the equivalent role was a director of cricket – typically an ex-player – who oversaw the men’s first team. Now, Thomas is in charge of Warwickshire men and women, as well as the relaunch of a franchise run jointly with new investors Knighthead, an American investment fund.
“The club have been quite brave and ambitious,” Thomas tells ESPNcricinfo, reflecting on his first nine months in post. “There seems to be a fairly traditional route to [becoming] a director of cricket: player, coach, head coach… They’ve gone, ‘actually, we want to try to do something different.’ Whether it’s a risk or not? We’ll find out in a few years’ time.”
It is Thomas’ first role in cricket and he has positioned himself as “the outsider coming in” throughout his career. He describes himself as a promising young rugby union player – he played for Newcastle Falcons’ academy, Leeds Tykes, and then in New Zealand – whose career was cut short at 21 by injury, and he has consciously avoided working in the sport since.
“I smashed my ankles up, and had to retire young,” Thomas says. “I loved rugby – I still do – and perhaps it’s something I want to keep precious to me. I watch it as a passion rather than working in it… I decided if I couldn’t do it myself, I wanted to work with people at the top of the game across different sports.”
Thomas has had a peripatetic career, with roles at Welsh Athletics, GB Wheelchair Rugby, Welsh Boxing, British Judo and British Gymnastics before spending three-and-a-half years at Manchester City: “When you boil it down, every sport has the same challenge: how do you get people to improve?”
He cites the 2021 Olympic Games in Tokyo as a career highlight, overseeing the gymnasts that won three medals for Team GB while crossing paths with athletes he had worked with earlier in his career.
“When I worked at British Judo, we set up their academy… In Tokyo, I was sat there in Team GB House. The GB Judo team were coming in, and probably half of them had come from that academy programme; Chelsie Giles was the standout performer at Tokyo, winning a bronze medal, and she was part of that programme. It is quite satisfying, and very nice to see.
“It was the same with boxing. I had a great conversation with Lauren Price, who was part of the Commonwealth Games in 2014 when women’s boxing first came in… She is a really talented athlete who was deciding whether to go back to play football in Wales or carry on boxing, and I tried to convince her to stay – and then she’s winning Olympic gold in Tokyo. It has been great to impact careers along the way, and see people be successful.”
He describes his role with Manchester City as “strategic” and “hands-off”, primarily working on wide-lens projects – like a review of the club’s academy facilities – rather than directly with the first team, or Pep Guardiola. “There were lots of circles around Pep,” Thomas says, describing a sprawling behind-the-scenes structure. “There are a lot of directors who have big portfolios.”
Explaining his departure to European colleagues earned him some odd looks. “‘You’re going to leave Man City and go and work in cricket?’ I said, ‘Yeah, of course!’ I had great opportunities at Man City, and it was a really exciting period for the club. But this was a chance to come in and take the next big leap with Warwickshire, and integrate the Phoenix into what we do as a club.”
At Edgbaston, the structure is much more streamlined, and Thomas took a watching brief last summer after joining the club mid-season: “It was really helpful: the squads were assembled, the head coaches had their plans in place, and it was a really great period of time to come in, get to know people, and watch, listen, learn… and evaluate where I think our programmes are.”
After nine draws in 14 Championship matches last season, Thomas has brought in three seamers – Jordan Thompson, Keith Barker and Nathan Gilchrist – to provide some cutting edge, while Graeme Welch is back as bowling coach. He is also targeting a women’s trophy, after Warwickshire’s defeat to Surrey in last year’s T20 Blast final.
Thomas cites data analysis as an area ripe for improvement, and the club are in the process of hiring a new head of data and intelligence. “We’ve seen data become such an important part of other professional sports,” he says. “Cricket has so much data available to it and from what I see… we’re just probably scratching the surface of how we could potentially use it.
“That’s one of the areas I really want to focus in on for the next few years: how do we take really good coaching knowledge and insight and then check and challenge it with really good data, whether that’s in the way we recruit, the way we develop players in our academy and pathways, or the way we select our teams? That really excites me.
“You need good infrastructure behind it, and you need the right systems in place to interpret and visualise it… in three years’ time, we could have the best data and insights set-up of any county in the country. That’s something I had to put forward to the club, and the board have been really supportive.”
There are obvious differences between how club football and domestic cricket are structured. At City, academy graduates like Nico O’Reilly and Phil Foden are available for every first-team game in a season, pending fitness; Warwickshire, by contrast, may not see Jacob Bethell at all this summer, due to international duty and his IPL commitments.
“The best players in the world play in the Premier League and then, in designated periods, play for their country; here, it all runs concurrently,” Thomas reflects. “It is a challenge, because effectively you produce really great players and then you might not see them for big periods of time. But for the club, that is also a big marker for success: ‘Can we develop international players?'”
It was significant, therefore, that the Phoenix secured Bethell as a pre-signing before this week’s Hundred auctions on a deal that will earn him £1.02 million across the next three years. After five seasons at arms’ length, Warwickshire are now majority partners in the Phoenix and were determined to make him one of the faces of the franchise in its new era.
The Hundred has been divisive within English cricket, but Thomas’ anecdotal evidence is that it has expanded the sport’s reach. “When I spoke to anybody about going into cricket, they would say, ‘Wow, I love the Hundred.’ Clearly, over the last three or four years, it’s done its job in terms of reaching new audiences that didn’t say that about the Blast or the County Championship.”
He speaks regularly to officials at Knighthead, the Phoenix’s new co-owners, who are best known to English sports fans as the owners of Birmingham City FC. “They are very mindful that they don’t have a huge amount of expertise in cricket, but they are helping us in many different ways… We have a really good working relationship with Knighthead.”
Their other pre-signings are Rehan Ahmed, Donovan Ferreira and Mitchell Owen in the men’s Hundred, plus Ellyse Perry, Alice Capsey, Lauren Filer and Lucy Hamilton in the women’s competition. They will sign at least 10 more players for each squad at the auctions, where Thomas believes the Phoenix will benefit from a cold-blooded approach.
Thomas cites Davina Perrin, the young Warwickshire batter who scored a dazzling, 41-ball century for Northern Superchargers in last year’s eliminator, as a potential target, but insists that the Phoenix’s focus will be on roles and skillsets more than individuals. He also makes explicit that they will actively consider players from all nations, including Pakistan.
“Are there franchises that have IPL ownership that have players that they’re more aligned to, and therefore will want to go for those players again? And is that an advantage to them or a disadvantage to them? […] There’s a time and a place for emotion, but perhaps the auction isn’t the place to become overly emotive.
“Everyone will have their own strategy and approach. Who will bluff? Who will play games and raise the paddle for every player and try to drive the prices high? Who will sit quietly and wait and see? It’s going to be really fascinating, and I think it’s going to be a great spectacle for the sport.”
Even still, it will feel a world away from the Bernabéu.
