There was only one serious candidate to take over the white-ball captaincy. What happens next in Harry Brook’s story will go a long way to revealing where the game sits in the public imagination. This extract was first published in issue 87 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to buy here.
It had to be him. When Harry Brook was announced, the appointment made immediate sense. You could almost hear the relief. They’ve got one right.
Rob Key did admit to a dalliance with the idea of Ben Stokes before conceding, not unreasonably, that he has knee-knack, is twice retired from ODI cricket and has two series to secure the legacy of his Test team. After Stokes, there was no one else.
True, they may have preferred a smoother succession plan, making the call, say, after the 2026 T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka that follows the Ashes, ideally in those sun-drenched moments after Jos Buttler, demons exorcised, is carried aloft from the field.
Nice idea, but cricket doesn’t do schmaltz. Buttler described his last days as England captain as “very unenjoyable”. That was one way of putting it.
Brook was always the one earmarked to take over. The only real question was when. There may be merit in the notion of Brook being the right man at the wrong time, but this is professional sport; careers end, invariably, in failure – and when one blows up, another is hastily established. Painless handovers are for the birds, and Australia.
Two summers ago, on the eve of his first Ashes series, Harry Brook was talking to us at Headingley and patiently waiting for the inevitable question, the one he knew was coming. The answer he gave may have been semi-rehearsed. It didn’t mean it wasn’t sincere.
“I’m putting all my energy towards English cricket – Test cricket and the white-ball stuff. If there was a time where a franchise competition collided with England, I would a hundred per cent – one hundred per cent – play for England.”
On the eve of this year’s IPL, Brook pulled out of his £590k contract with the Delhi Capitals. It caused a sensation. Scores of plumply payrolled former players lined up to tell him he was mad. The tournament owners made clear that following a recent ruling he would now be banned for two seasons. Brook apologised to the franchise, but his mind was clear. “I know not everyone will understand and I don’t expect them to, but I have to do what I believe is right,” he said. “I need time to recharge after the busiest period of my career.”
Framing this as a ‘club v country’ tussle is unhelpful, not least because it’s an increasingly unfair fight, but it was a natural impulse to applaud his stance, knowing the consequences both financial and reputational. One may argue that when a player reaches the summit, as Brook has done (in a relatively short space of time), they are afforded the option to make the gallant choice. Yet he’s always remained consistent throughout his career, never swaying or deviating depending on the weather. His public commitment to international cricket is a prized present, handed to a regime that could do with some good news. It’s also rather quaint.
So, he’s going to be busy. The move away from the IPL and all other franchise-shaped temptations was not just a statement of loyalty but a necessary act of self-preservation. Between now and the start of next year’s T20 World Cup, England have 11 Tests, 12 ODIs and 15 T20Is scheduled. Can he really be expected to play all of those? Rob Key and Brendon McCullum will need to manage him carefully, because one thing is for sure, Ben Stokes will not let him miss any Test cricket.
Then there’s the ‘tempo’ thing – the word that became a winter obsession. Were England’s 50-over white-ballers guilty of going too hard, too fast, too often? Has Bazball spiralled out of whack? Is the ECB to blame for neglecting 50-over cricket, thus depriving their batters of the chance to learn the format’s peculiar nuances on a rung below the world stage? Do we overthink things a bit too much?
England tilted the scales too much against their favour by telling Phil Salt and Jamie Smith to treat the first 10 overs as a T20 game and, exacerbated by a middle-order – Buttler, Brook, Livingstone – that was struggling for rhythm, the policy seemed reckless. But is there something fundamentally rotten in the minds and bodies of England’s batters? No.
Brook’s first squad is a recalibration of this approach, with Smith promoted to open with Ben Duckett, followed by a class-heavy middle order of Root, Brook, Buttler and Jacob Bethell, with Will Jacks at No.7. It looks sturdier.
Brook himself has not yet got close to mastering the old adagio-allegro shuffle, especially in the quietish middle overs, when the top players in the format roll on without risk at a run-a-ball. He can still appear in thrall to the spectacular shot, when a flick and a dab along the carpet can be just as handy. This could also simply be a symptom of a patch of poor form, the likes of which no player has ever escaped; last September against Australia, in prime form in his first outing as a skipper, he batted majestically.
England have announced their XI for the first ODI against the West Indies on Thursday.#ENGvWI pic.twitter.com/zpNi3knCbd
— Wisden (@WisdenCricket) May 28, 2025
For the first time in his England career, he looked genuinely uneasy in the white-ball games of last winter, and thus, strange things happened. But remember what occurred immediately before that – 723 runs in six Tests, with three tons, one of which was the first triple by an Englishman in 33 years.
Harry Brook is nobody’s fool. He deals with the madness from behind a wall of studied casualness. He doesn’t waste words, and when he does speak it’s to the point. Self-help books are for other people. He’s neither shy nor cocky but a little bit of both, and he plays off scratch. The charisma, and there’s plenty, comes through in earthy form, excavated from the Yorkshire dales and the tightly bound community from where he hails, and from the way that he bats, when on the good days it looks like the greatest experience in the world.
Brook’s forerunners are so obvious as to be hackneyed yet their stories may offer us a glimpse into his own future. Andrew Flintoff and Ben Stokes, for many different and similar reasons, are the only cricketers of this English century to break through the partition separating cricket from the public consciousness. Books have been written about why this may be. Cultural fragmentation. Paywalled coverage. Rotten administrations. The omniscience of football. Failures of perception. (Or, as Kyle Hogg summed it up to me recently, in the context of producing Flintoff’s hugely successful show Field of Dreams, “Every single person we spoke to describes it as a Tory sport”.) There is no shortage of theories.
TV, and his immense likeability, made Flintoff famous – first through Channel 4, and then the BBC. His early fame, framed around Edgbaston, The Oval and Trafalgar Square, seems poignant. Stokes’ route to self-titled documentaries, on the other hand, took a much rockier path. He’d only just begun to clamber through it, when a single summer’s ascent to greatness brushed all the rubble away. Both men took the BBC’s Sports Personality of the Year, the only cricketers to do so this century. Brook is the next in line. As well as all the rest of it, he is clearly the Test captain in waiting. England are staking a lot on his gifts.
Flintoff and Stokes both love him – the former through working with him at Northern Superchargers, and the latter as a kind of spirit guide and mentor, though of course they’d hate such terms. On the one hand, it shouldn’t really matter whether or not Brook breaks through into the mainstream. He has a big enough job as it stands, without more projections being placed on top of it. But on the other hand, if not him, who? Harry Brook has the game, but not yet the name.
Somehow, in the next year or so, he needs to rebuild England’s white-ball teams, while figuring out how best to maximise his own game (spoiler: he’ll be fine), take up his place in the engine room of the Test team in the two biggest series an English cricketer can play, answer loads of prickly questions in sweaty press rooms often about issues far beyond cricket, inform some of his mates that they’re dropped, navigate the chaos of the modern schedule, ignore social media, and preserve the freedoms and joys which have helped make him one of the best batters on the planet.
If he can pull all that off and still be smiling, the public will want to sit up and take notice.
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