Flower finds peace after traumatic Ashes

After standing down as England's team director after a painful Ashes winter in Australia, Andy Flower has kept in touch with the game by going back to grass roots coaching at the Stratford-upon-Avon cricket club. He talks to Scyld Berry of the Telegraph on his latest coaching stint, the circumstances that led to his resignation and why he backs Alastair Cook to remain captain.

Flower was not in England for a single ball of the two-Test series in Sri Lanka. Still employed by the England and Wales Cricket Board as the technical director of elite coaching, he was attending several conferences in the United States. One was about the creativity of athletes in extreme sports. "Some of these athletes are brilliant at what they do, highly skilled, but crucially a lot of them have never been coached," Flower said. "Their environment was all about learning from their mistakes and their peers without formal coaching - and there may be lessons to be learned there.