TThe curtain fell on the Ashes in Sydney, with England once again outplayed in the basics of the game. But it’s one thing to have a weak team and quite another to have a talented team that just looks muddled.
I was very optimistic going into the series because England had a quality group of players, many of them in their twenties – their prime years in my opinion – who had played a lot of international cricket together, had come through a tough series against India, and seemed to have developed their approach, adding nuance and adaptability, and evolving from their old one-size-fits-all swagger. Well, high expectations can be dangerous because when things don’t work out, the disappointment is all the greater.
So I look at the wreckage of this series and all those high expectations and ask myself: has this management group – Rob Key, Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes – given the England squad the best chance of success? They all seem optimistic that they can continue and of the three, it’s hard to argue that Stokes shouldn’t: he’s the clear leader in the group and there aren’t many other candidates.
Certainly new vice-captain Harry Brook has done nothing since taking charge of the white-ball team – both on and off the pitch – to suggest he is willing to step up. So if Stokes is fit and motivated, he seems like the right man. The problem is that he has committed himself to McCullum, and the case for both the head coach and Key, the man who appointed him, is not nearly as clear.
You can distill their work from this: they can’t get on the field, they can’t lead by example, their job is to get the planning and preparation 100% right so that those who do can perform to the best of their ability. Everyone knows that didn’t happen. Most coaches I know are very organized. They love to plan and take pride in being thorough in their preparation. They do this so that, regardless of how the results go and how their team plays, they can look back on matches, tournaments and series without regrets. The team can be outplayed, it can happen, and they can live with it as long as they have that box checked. Well, England desperately needed someone to do that job, and there wasn’t one.
They have just come off the back of a big series, but are also on the cusp of a major tournament, with their T20 World Cup campaign starting in less than a month in Mumbai. I think McCullum should do that tournament and then, in the almost three months between its conclusion and the first Test of the summer, reconsider his approach to the course and perhaps his suitability for it. By the end of the Ashes series, that process seemed to have already begun.
The refrain since he took over has been: we play this brand, we choose players who fit the brand. That was a big change for cricket: in my experience most teams, even the best, have a mix of players with their own approach. So the last time England won in Australia we had Alastair Cook with his rock solid defense and batting, but we also had Kevin Pietersen trying to take the attack to the bowlers and score faster.
But McCullum’s rhetoric was: play this way, otherwise you won’t play at all. What is truly devastating about this journey is that England’s best performances – Joe Root’s two centuries, Jacob Bethell in Sydney, even Stokes himself with his 83 in Adelaide – have not followed that method at all. Root is backing his defence, showing good concentration and hitting balls into gaps. Not for him the macho, crash-bang-wallop, bowler-of-his-height, run-toward-danger nonsense that led so many others to give away their wickets.
Bethell played with very good fundamentals, respected the good ball, took the bad ball, didn’t outplay it, played good cricket shots, and perhaps he hasn’t been around long enough to be tainted by the rhetoric.
Then bowling was supposed to be all about high pace, but it turned out what we needed was high skill. The big hit was Josh Tongue, who isn’t that fast, doesn’t bowl many bouncers, but aims for the top of the stump and takes his rewards. England’s top performers have turned their backs on the style management wants, and that is reflected very poorly.
If the entire cricketing world is saying that England just haven’t got the basics right, that they haven’t mastered the core skills, have batted poorly, bowled poorly and dropped catches, and when the team’s best players have performed despite the coach’s directives and not because of them, how can he stay on his job? This series has destroyed his credibility.
Now McCullum says he’s willing to make “a few adjustments.” He is not a hugely experienced coach and perhaps he is evolving, but his responsibilities include the culture of the group, player behavior on and off the pitch, tour planning and player improvement. Has he succeeded, and if not, should there be any accountability? For all their recent shortcomings, this group contains some excellent Test players and others who should grow into one, and are we sure he’s the right person to help them evolve?
McCullum and Key selected some players with very poor results in first-class cricket, sometimes based on nothing more than hunches, and then oversaw a gradual erosion of the specialist coaches who supported them. We have seen a lack of technical ability in some players, seemingly the direct result of the abandonment of technical models in coaching.
Have we appointed the right people to coach not just the seniors but the Lions and at all levels, people with the drive and experience needed to improve players? Because I see people getting promoted who are fresh out of their careers, people who have the right friends rather than the right qualifications.
It’s tempting to have knee-jerk reactions after a series like this, but I have my own view of what I think is an ideal environment and I don’t think England have found it. So let’s think about who has the right experience and qualifications. We want to produce good cricketers and win good cricket matches. We want to be aggressive when the opportunity presents itself, to lead the way, and we want a professional, elite team with good behavior and a good culture.
For me, the most obvious candidate to achieve that with England is someone who has been doing it for Surrey for years. So after the dust settles, the very first thing I would do is call Alec Stewart.
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