Wait, what? Four days on, and nothing about the weekend that’s just gone seems to make much sense. It was England’s seventh defeat in nine Tests, and somehow, at the end of it, they’ve lost the last man anyone really wanted to go. Ben Stokes, his own man all the way to the end, has apparently decided he would rather spend his remaining days in the game playing championship cricket for Durham. A man whose career has been marked by copper-bottomed self-conviction has left English cricket facing a whole lot of questions.
The first of them is whether Brendon McCullum is really the right man to try to rebuild this England team in the years ahead.
What is it, exactly, that makes the ECB think the answer is “yes”? The progress shown by Zak Crawley? Or Ollie Pope? The way England spent 18 months grooming Shoaib Bashir to play in Australia and then didn’t pick him when they got there? That solitary game England gave to Josh Hull in 2024? The way Matt Potts has progressed since his breakthrough season? The hook James Rew played at the Oval? That reverse sweep Emilio Gay tried before stumps on Sunday?
Back in 2022 McCullum was leading an England team who knew exactly what they were doing. Jimmy Anderson, Stuart Broad, Joe Root, Jonny Bairstow, Stokes – they didn’t need coaching, they needed coaxing. They had grown jaded from playing through the pandemic, and McCullum’s messages about attacking more, worrying less and taking time to enjoy yourself got them playing some of the most enjoyable and entertaining cricket we’ve been lucky enough to see in this country.
Four years later, these same messages are starting to feel like the last things the young players who have replaced them in the team need to hear. Root has more caps – 166 – than the rest of the dressing room put together. Ben Duckett, with 46 Tests to his name, is their second-most experienced player. This is a side that is going to have to learn Test cricket while playing it. They don’t need to stop worrying and start enjoying themselves more. The ECB know this. You don’t talk about needing to “reset” something you already believe is fundamentally working.
And how did that “reset” sound on Monday, when McCullum was being interviewed by the BBC? Jonathan Agnew asked about the side’s batting collapse on Sunday evening, when they scored 103 for four in just 15 overs of cricket. “It was definitely situational,” McCullum said. He felt sure it would be too hard to score on the last day, when, as it happened, their No 8 Gus Atkinson managed to bat for 90 minutes. “We obviously didn’t want to be four down, but our approach was to try and take out as much of the chase as we could.”
People have been asking McCullum to change for about as long as he’s been playing the game.
There’s a story from late 2008, when New Zealand were playing West Indies in the second game of a long-forgotten T20 series. They had been bowled out cheaply in the first, and their coach, Andy Moles, tried to persuade McCullum to set a better example for his inexperienced teammates after he was dismissed trying to skip down the pitch to hit his 10th ball for six. “Baz,” Moles said, “can you give me seven or eight overs of you just batting so that we can get these kids into the game and settle the team? Pull back on the reins, settle into the game, then go?”
McCullum, then 27, said no. “Sorry about what the team needs. I’m building a brand, and it’s called brand McCullum. This is how I play.” The next day he hit 59 off 34 balls. New Zealand won by 36 runs. “Brand McCullum was up and running,” Moles wrote in his autobiography, Around The World in 40 Years. “Everywhere he’s gone he’s got his own brand of cricket,” Moles wrote, “Over-aggressive as a batsman, over-aggressive as a coach. Who says he’s wrong? Look at him now. Bazball is Brand McCullum.”
That tension between how McCullum likes to play cricket and how people around him think he should has been there all the way through his career. In Ross Taylor’s book Black & White he recalls a West Indies tour when McCullum filled in for him as captain. “I believed we drank more than an elite sports team should, especially an elite sports team that wasn’t winning. The mindset was: ‘Lose, drink booze.’ We had great jobs – travelling the world playing cricket representing our country – but some players treated it as a holiday rather than a job. Cricket sometimes seemed secondary to playing golf and getting on the piss.”
Do stop me when any of this starts to sound familiar.
Taylor remembers a tour of the Caribbean. “To me it seemed strange to be out drinking till 11 o’clock or midnight the night before a game. On that tour, for instance, there were guys still in the bar after 11pm when we were leaving the hotel at seven the next morning to play an ODI at 9am.” According to Taylor, “I just didn’t buy the notion that what happens at the bar is team culture. Brendon took a different view.” Or he did. Now we’re told he is different. He said he was bewildered, gutted, and angry when he found Stokes broke the curfew after the Lord’s Test.
McCullum was critical of Taylor’s captaincy in his own book, Declared. McCullum could argue that Taylor has an axe to grind, that his own way of playing got better results than New Zealand achieved under Taylor’s leadership, that he got the best out of his team in ways Taylor could never achieve, that the sense of enjoyment and camaraderie he gave England was instrumental in the run they went on in the years after he first took over. If I’m honest with myself, some of my anger now is exactly because I enjoyed what they achieved so much, and, in the end, it’s added up to nothing much more than good memories of matches that didn’t much matter, and a generation of players who seem to have got lost along the way.
Maybe instead of trying to persuade the coach to change himself, English cricket just needs to accept it is time to change the coach.
