![\"Ben](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/djuskuqcti.jpg\")
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Phil Walker, WCM editor-in-chief, grapples with where it all went wrong for England in Australia and considers how the mess can now be fixed. This article first appeared in issue 94 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, out on January 22, available to pre-order now<\/a>.<\/p>\n If it hadn\u2019t been for Jacob Bethell, I might just have packed it in for good. Thankfully that innings alone, that cloudburst of joy, will sustain me quite easily for a while yet. The purity of it. The logical good sense of it all. Even Nietzsche would have doffed his cap at those u\u0308bermensch back-foot punches. \u201cHope is in truth the worst of all evils, because it protracts the torment of men,\u201d Nietzsche once wrote. And they say he wasn\u2019t even into his sport.<\/p>\n There may have been worse tours, more sustained runs of pain and anguish and howling fury, but I don\u2019t know of any. Having been there in the flesh in 2006 and 2013 and 2017, I\u2019d dimly dared to think that things could never get any worse than the worst of those. Wrong.<\/p>\n I thought that England would compete with spirit and some degree of nous. I didn\u2019t expect Ben Stokes to blink at the toss or lose his nerve on the field in the hot heat of a run chase. I was convinced that Harry Brook would step into the space earmarked for him. Wrong, wrong, wrong again.<\/p>\n I had my doubts about certain players, and the weird slimness of the squad, and the alarming absence of technical rigour in the coaching messages. I wasn\u2019t too sure about the regime\u2019s tendency to coddle their own (and eschew others) \u2013 that seemed to me a bit juvenile, a bit shallow and indulgent, too much pressure and responsibility being \u2018a bad thing\u2019, but not enough being not much better.<\/p>\n Still, it is true, I can\u2019t deny it, I believed in what they stood for and genuinely thought they would run Australia close. I cleaved to the idea \u2013 I guess I still do \u2013 that an England Test team could be genuinely progressive, and ignored the warning signs that the good intentions of that original idea had begun to disfigure. I couldn\u2019t see how the culture inside the set-up was turning bloated, fattened up on its own stash, and too self-satisfied to bother listening to the voices of caution from outside the tent until the thing had all but eaten itself. The hard-relaxing, anything-goes vibe, typified by a capacity to go missing in the big moments, has done significant damage to the team\u2019s relationship with its public. I hope they realise that.<\/p>\n I recently spoke to a cricket person you will know well, a man who I\u2019d class as an incurable optimist \u2013 and even he\u2019s lost much of his love for the England cricket team. It reminds me a little of that 2013 team, the one that unravelled on their final tour of Australia in a chaos of spiralling egos, anxiety and resentment. They had become unlikeable, until they disliked themselves. The difference with that team, of course, is that they\u2019d won the lot before it went wrong.<\/p>\n So what now? It seems like Brendon McCullum will be given the chance to make right, though his stock is through the floor. He has too many jobs \u2013 the move to hand him the lot looked illogical at the time, and now looks positively decadent. In a functioning high-performance set-up he would be relieved of at least one of his roles, and the logical one to lose would be the Test team, which has atrophied for two years and regressed of late. It\u2019s tempting to repurpose the old line about all political careers ending in failure to that of England cricket coaches.<\/p>\n Rob Key too, who deserved great credit for trading in his cushy number at Sky for his current job, appears isolated and friendless. If he is intent on carrying on too \u2013 and I have my doubts \u2013 then his first job should be to repair some of the bridges he so hastily burned between the England set-up and the county clubs that remain the game\u2019s lifeblood.<\/p>\n The future of Stokes is harder to define. He has signed a two-year contract, which will take him up to the next Ashes, and he has indicated that he wants to carry on. Not even the most studious revisionist and told-you-so merchant \u2013 of which English cricket has legion \u2013 can deny that Stokes is a great cricketer who has done gargantuan things for the cause. Channelling his compulsions into a kind of relentless self-improvement, his career arc is extraordinary. This winter, the ride veered horribly off course. But it is not run yet.<\/p>\n Stokes was 26, a talent yet unfulfilled, when he staggered into a nightclub in Bristol in the early hours midway through an ODI series. The way he emerged from that shameful night to rebuild his reputation remains the defining story of his unique career. Harry Brook, also 26, may want to take note.<\/p>\n Those who know Brook attest to a decent lad, drily funny, smarter than he lets on, just a bit loose. This may be a fair assessment. It\u2019s worth noting that Brook has never shied away from playing for England, and that he eschewed the IPL to keep himself fresh for England captaincy commitments, despite knowing the financial consequences. And look, he still averages 55 in Test cricket. He has made more runs than Joe Root in the games they have played together.<\/p>\n But somewhere down the line, he has come to embody the disconnect between this team and its public. Perhaps this is partly down to his ability: English sports fans instinctively distrust outlandish talents and go in hard when they don\u2019t get it right every time. Mostly though, they just can\u2019t stand arrogance. And hubris is even worse.<\/p>\n After his first large-scale humbling, Brook faces the first major crisis of his career. It becomes now a question of character \u2013 as ever it was with cricketers. Just ask Stokes. This winter could yet be the making of Harry Brook. What a desperate shame it couldn\u2019t have happened earlier.<\/p>\n This article appears in issue 94 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to pre-order now<\/a>.<\/p>\n Follow Wisden for all cricket updates, including live scores<\/a>, match stats, quizzes<\/a> and more. Stay up to date with the latest cricket news<\/a>, player updates, team standings,<\/a> match highlights, video analysis<\/a> and live match odds<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Phil Walker, WCM editor-in-chief, grapples with where it all went wrong for England in Australia and considers how…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":372749,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-372748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=372748"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/372748\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/372749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=372748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=372748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=372748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}