Ben Stokes has played down talks of a rift with Brendon McCullum, saying they want to ‘work together’ but ‘in a different way’ than earlier.
Reports of a difference in opinions between the England captain and coach surfaced during the 2025/26 Ashes, which they lot 4-1. Stokes hasn’t played professional cricket since the Sydney Test after suffering a freak injury to his cheekbone during a net session with Durham in February.
Talking to the ECB media team about his reported rift with McCullum, Stokes stressed that he remained on the same page with his head coach, before adding that there would always be a difference in approach, but not something that couldn’t be solved by a discussion.
"When you're in a position of leadership along with someone else, if anyone thinks that you're always going to agree on everything, then it's just impossible," Stokes told the ECB. "To me, that just isn't a healthy environment for sport, in particular, where everyone just agrees with everyone or says yes to the person up there. You need debate. You need… not arguments, but you need discussions. Then you end up getting to the place you both want to end up getting to.”
"As similar as me and Brendon are, we're also dissimilar in other areas as well. But the thing we both want is to be as successful as we possibly can,” he further added. “How we get to being successful might be the same here, but slightly differs here - but we will always be able to end up in the same place by having these discussions.
“We agree 95% of the time on things, but those 5% things that we might have different views on, we talk about it between each other and then we end up getting to the place where we both feel that we want to get to. Agreeing on every single thing, that's just impossible. Saying that we weren't aligned, I think is a massive overstatement."
Will work together with McCullum in a slightly different way: Ben Stokes
Stokes hinted that with the recent run of results not going according to their plan, a slight change in approach could be expected.
"I'm very confident in mine and Brendon's ability to be able to work together - because we've done it for such a long period of time now - but work together in a slightly different way,” he added. “The main point of me and Brendon is our alignment towards winning things and making this team as good as they can be. That's always been the thing since we started.
“It might just look a little bit different now to how that operates, on the back of four years working together. But we still want to win everything, and we still want to give the guys the best chance that they possibly can of being as good as they can be."
The ECB had announced in March that Stokes and McCullum would continue in their respective roles as the England men’s captain and coach, respectively, while Rob Key would stay on as the managing director.
Also read: Can McCullum’s second chance bring restraint to England’s revolution?
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