Brendon McCullum can use Ashes trauma to drive new England standards

I don’t mind the decision to keep Rob Key and Brendon McCullum in charge of England cricket . . . but only if they are prepared to adapt.

It was hard to work out really what the conclusions were from the review into the Ashes defeat. There was an awful lot of management jargon in what Key, England’s managing director, and Richard Gould, the ECB chief executive, talked about when they gave their press conference on Monday. This regime has been pretty good at cutting out the jargon, but here it felt like they were dancing around little issues and not really getting to the heart of it.

The biggest issue for me was that a fundamental part of the philosophy was faulty — the desire to take pressure off players. That’s an admirable thing to try to do, but in the biggest matches, like an Ashes Test in Australia, you simply can’t remove the pressure. You need players who are used to that pressure, who can front up to it and deal with it. England didn’t.

Key and Gould did admit that there should have been warm-up games. By the time England got to the first Test in Perth they weren’t match hardened. But whose fault was that? It wasn’t clear from the review. Who signed off on that tour and that preparation? Was it McCullum, the head coach, or Key? At the beginning of the tour they were saying it was the best way to prepare.

So they didn’t have sufficient preparation before the first Test, after which none of the Test players featured in the day-night match against the Prime Minister’s XI in Canberra before the second Test under the lights in Brisbane. That was an opportunity to put themselves under pressure and score some runs in a match scenario.

I always refer back to county pre-season games or friendly matches on a tour, where it’s predetermined that one side will bat all day and the other side the next day. If you get out for very little, and if your side is bowled out before the end of the day, the coach will come over and ask, “Do you want another hit?”

The easy thing is to say no, because you don’t want the embarrassment of getting out twice in a day, but on most occasions batting again is the right thing to do. You are putting yourself under more pressure, but it’s more beneficial than just hitting in the nets. If you get through that, you spend some time in the middle, do the hard yards and you’re all the better for it.

It is an unusual position for England to be in at the moment and one that could be beneficial. Normally at the end of a failed Ashes series, a captain or coach moves on, sometimes even both. Everything from now is a fresh start and everyone is looking forward. This set-up could now benefit from their shared experience in Australia. Teams can grow quickly after shared hardships. If England learn from the Ashes and use the emotion of losing badly to drive new standards, it could be a good thing.

McCullum definitely has something about him as a coach. He thinks slightly differently and that undoubtedly works for some of the players. The question is, can he change enough? He had such a set way of how he wanted England to play, so I’m intrigued by how a person with such strong principles is going to adapt.

The side had a very clear identity right from the get-go; in only the second Test of the McCullum regime, in 2022, Jonny Bairstow scored an astonishing century off 77 balls at Trent Bridge to secure a series win against New Zealand. Now McCullum needs to work out what the new identity is going to look like, along with Ben Stokes. What they’ve been through could hold them in good stead.

The first sign of change will be evident from their team selection, and how they build back a relationship with county cricket. I think they need to pay more attention to detail, ditch the laissez-faire attitude and focus more on the basics. They need a full-time fielding coach and a bowling coach who doesn’t just turn up on the eve of the most important series.

What I wouldn’t do is criticise the present regime based on what players who are out of the team say. Often players will criticise the environment and how tough it was to fit in, when actually it’s just that they struggled in international cricket.

Liam Livingstone said that since he was dropped, nobody from the regime cared about him, and Bairstow has said something similar. Ultimately, if a player is in the team, they never criticise the coach in public, it just doesn’t happen. That’s why players like Harry Brook describe playing under McCullum as the best experience ever.

Whereas when you are out of the side and you think you’re not going to get back in, it’s easier to criticise, hence Livingstone described the Champions Trophy last year as the worst experience of his time in cricket. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

In international cricket, there is a lot of responsibility on the players. Livingstone wasn’t scoring enough runs and nor was Bairstow towards the end. So for all the criticisms I have of Key and McCullum, I wouldn’t be too worried about what people who are out of the side say about them.

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