{"id":671351,"date":"2026-07-03T09:01:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-03T09:01:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/671351\/"},"modified":"2026-07-03T09:01:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-03T09:01:10","slug":"stokes-has-left-a-vacuum-is-mccullum-really-the-coach-to-mould-a-young-england-team-brendon-mccullum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/671351\/","title":{"rendered":"Stokes has left a vacuum \u2013 is McCullum really the coach to mould a young England team? | Brendon McCullum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Wait, what? Four days on, and nothing about the weekend that\u2019s just gone seems to make much sense. It was England\u2019s seventh defeat in nine Tests, and somehow, at the end of it, they\u2019ve lost the last man anyone really wanted to go<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

The first of them is whether Brendon McCullum<\/a> is really the right man to try to rebuild this England team in the years ahead.<\/p>\n

What is it, exactly, that makes the ECB think the answer is \u201cyes\u201d? 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\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 they didn\u2019t need coaching, they needed coaxing. They had grown jaded from playing through the pandemic, and McCullum\u2019s messages about attacking more, worrying less and taking time to enjoy yourself got them playing some of the most enjoyable and entertaining cricket we\u2019ve been lucky enough to see in this country.<\/p>\n

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 \u2013 166 \u2013 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\u2019t need to stop worrying and start enjoying themselves more. The ECB know this. You don\u2019t talk about needing to \u201creset\u201d something you already believe is fundamentally working.<\/p>\n

Ben Stokes with Brendon McCullum in May 2022, the month the New Zealander was appointed England\u2019s head coach. Photograph: Steven Paston\/PA<\/p>\n

And how did that \u201creset\u201d sound on Monday, when McCullum was being interviewed by the BBC? Jonathan Agnew asked about the side\u2019s batting collapse<\/a> on Sunday evening, when they scored 103 for four in just 15 overs of cricket. \u201cIt was definitely situational,\u201d 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. \u201cWe obviously didn\u2019t want to be four down, but our approach was to try and take out as much of the chase as we could.\u201d<\/p>\n

People have been asking McCullum to change for about as long as he\u2019s been playing the game.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s 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. \u201cBaz,\u201d Moles said, \u201ccan 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?\u201d<\/p>\n

McCullum, then 27, said no. \u201cSorry about what the team needs. I\u2019m building a brand, and it\u2019s called brand McCullum. This is how I play.\u201d The next day he hit 59 off 34 balls. New Zealand won by 36 runs. \u201cBrand McCullum was up and running,\u201d Moles wrote in his autobiography, Around The World in 40 Years. \u201cEverywhere he\u2019s gone he\u2019s got his own brand of cricket,\u201d Moles wrote, \u201cOver-aggressive as a batsman, over-aggressive as a coach. Who says he\u2019s wrong? Look at him now. Bazball is Brand McCullum.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019s book Black & White he recalls a West Indies tour when McCullum filled in for him as captain. \u201cI believed we drank more than an elite sports team should, especially an elite sports team that wasn\u2019t winning. The mindset was: \u2018Lose, drink booze.\u2019 We had great jobs \u2013 travelling the world playing cricket representing our country \u2013 but some players treated it as a holiday rather than a job. Cricket<\/a> sometimes seemed secondary to playing golf and getting on the piss.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Do stop me when any of this starts to sound familiar.<\/p>\n

Taylor remembers a tour of the Caribbean. \u201cTo me it seemed strange to be out drinking till 11 o\u2019clock 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.\u201d According to Taylor, \u201cI just didn\u2019t buy the notion that what happens at the bar is team culture. Brendon took a different view.\u201d Or he did. Now we\u2019re told he is different. He said he was bewildered, gutted, and angry when he found Stokes broke the curfew after the Lord\u2019s Test.<\/p>\n

Harry Brook plays a scoop shot as Tom Blundell looks on. The batter got away with this one but was soon out as England\u2019s fearlessness became muddled with carelessness. Photograph: Philip Brown\/Getty Images<\/p>\n

McCullum was critical of Taylor\u2019s captaincy in his own book, Declared<\/a>. 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\u2019s 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\u2019m honest with myself, some of my anger now is exactly because I enjoyed what they achieved so much, and, in the end, it\u2019s added up to nothing much more than good memories of matches that didn\u2019t much matter, and a generation of players who seem to have got lost along the way.<\/p>\n

Maybe instead of trying to persuade the coach to change himself, English cricket just needs to accept it is time to change the coach.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Wait, what? Four days on, and nothing about the weekend that\u2019s just gone seems to make much sense.…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":671352,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-671351","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\/671351","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=671351"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/671351\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/671352"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=671351"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=671351"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=671351"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}