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.
If it hadn’t 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 übermensch back-foot punches. “Hope is in truth the worst of all evils, because it protracts the torment of men,” Nietzsche once wrote. And they say he wasn’t even into his sport.
There may have been worse tours, more sustained runs of pain and anguish and howling fury, but I don’t know of any. Having been there in the flesh in 2006 and 2013 and 2017, I’d dimly dared to think that things could never get any worse than the worst of those. Wrong.
I thought that England would compete with spirit and some degree of nous. I didn’t 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.
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’t too sure about the regime’s tendency to coddle their own (and eschew others) – that seemed to me a bit juvenile, a bit shallow and indulgent, too much pressure and responsibility being ‘a bad thing’, but not enough being not much better.
Still, it is true, I can’t deny it, I believed in what they stood for and genuinely thought they would run Australia close. I cleaved to the idea – I guess I still do – 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’t 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’s relationship with its public. I hope they realise that.
I recently spoke to a cricket person you will know well, a man who I’d class as an incurable optimist – and even he’s 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’d won the lot before it went wrong.
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 – 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’s tempting to repurpose the old line about all political careers ending in failure to that of England cricket coaches.
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 – and I have my doubts – 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’s lifeblood.
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 – of which English cricket has legion – 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.
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.
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’s 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.
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’t get it right every time. Mostly though, they just can’t stand arrogance. And hubris is even worse.
After his first large-scale humbling, Brook faces the first major crisis of his career. It becomes now a question of character – 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’t have happened earlier.
This article appears in issue 94 of Wisden Cricket Monthly, available to pre-order now.
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