‘Not the end of the road for Broad and Anderson’

LONDON (BBC): Andrew Strauss has insisted that “no-one is saying this is the end of the road” for James Anderson and Stuart Broad after they were left out of the squad for the Test series against West Indies but urged England to recognise that “there is life beyond them as well”.
Strauss, the ECB’s interim managing director of men’s cricket, was part of a three-man selection panel – along with interim coach Paul Collingwood and national scout James Taylor – which dropped eight members of England’s Ashes squad for next month’s West Indies tour, with Anderson and Broad the headline omissions.
Strauss said in a press release that England needed to “refresh” the squad in order to compete away from home, and at Lord’s on Wednesday, he added that the decision had been made in order to give other seamers – such as Chris Woakes and Mark Wood – the opportunity to “show a bit of leadership”.
“They were both disappointed and you wouldn’t expect anything else from two of England’s greatest bowlers,” Strauss told the BBC. “I just think it’s important to look at the frame in which we’re looking at this tour.
“The truth is our Test team haven’t performed well for a while now and our batting in particular hasn’t been up to the level it needs to be. Secondly, if we want to be the best team in the world, we have to win away from home consistently. We haven’t done that – I think we’ve won four out of our last 13 series away from home, and that needs to improve. And this is the start of a new cycle, so it’s an opportunity to refresh and look forward.
“With that in mind we see this as an opportunity to bring some new blood into the bowling resources. [There’s] obviously some change in the batting line-up as well, but [we will] also ask our existing bowlers to play a slightly different role to the one they’ve played before and show a bit more leadership, so we have the opportunity to do that now. “No-one is saying that Broad and Anderson won’t feature this summer and beyond but my job, I think, as director of cricket, is to give whoever takes over, the new director of cricket and coach, options from which to pick.