As the 2025/26 Ashes draws to a close, and a new cycle starts for England, Ben Gardner examines whether Brendon McCullum is the man to lead them into the next chapter.
Leadership appointments across all sports tend to follow a cycle, with each coach in some way a reaction to what has come before them. A disciplinarian, whose team has become too rigid, too preoccupied with process, will be followed by someone more relaxed. Their players will at first revel in the freedom afforded, and then take liberties and find their fundamentals weakened. At which point it’s time once again for a bit more discipline, and the pattern continues. You can see similar patterns with where coaches come from: the outsider who can challenge received wisdom or the product of the system itself, who knows its workings intimately and can work with them. Very few coaches can find sustained success with one method, and so the game fluctuates.
It’s possible to apply this thinking to Brendon McCullum, the ultimate vibes guy, who brought back the fun after the Covid suffocation only to find that the good times have gone bad. As an Ashes tour draws to a close and a new cycle begins, so comes the time to reflect on his position. Certainly, the details and the rigour have been lacking on this tour. McCullum has essentially admitted that England messed up their preparation for the first two Tests of the series, not working hard enough and then trying too hard in response, like the student who doesn’t bother to revise for the first exam, crams all night to make up for it, and then finds he could really have done with a sleep. This was the biggest assignment of McCullum’s coaching career, and he got it wrong. What’s more, he got it wrong in exactly the way he’s employed to get it right. With few pretensions as a technical coach, his main skill is supposed to be getting his players in the right headspace at the key moments. At that, he failed.
But let’s take a step back here. First, there are the challenges of touring Australia. Winning the fourth Test has made this England’s second best Ashes tour in over 20 years, but even before then they had a claim to that title. Even in going three-nil down in three, they had competed better than in three of the previous four, ahead late in the game at Perth and getting close at Adelaide. That still felt like a disappointment, but in part because of what England had done under McCullum before now. That failure to win a five-Test series stings, but up until the end of last year, this was a team that had improved its results and was bringing through a crop of new players at the same time. Those expectations were partly thanks to their own good work. The oscillation from one coaching style to another masks an uncomfortable truth: whatever you do, however you set up your team, winning in Australia is really hard. That’s why England’s tours invariably bring about change.
Still, in the last 12 months, something has shifted. Failure to beat India at home was just that, and McCullum’s missteps in England’s Ashes prep were the biggest of his career. They were also out of step from a team that had, for all the discourse around warm-up games and touring schedules, been excellent at getting ready for away series to that point. Before the Ashes, McCullum’s record in the first Test of away series read: played five, won five. They had creatively come to terms with the conditions they expected to face, plotting two extraordinary flat pitch heists in Pakistan and undertaking an extreme spin camp ahead of the India tour. The one rule on the latter was that you weren’t allowed to complain, even if a ball span square or shot low. You simply had to put it behind you and go again. It was that exact mindset that allowed Ollie Pope to play one of the great England Test innings in Ahmedabad, riding his luck and his broom to 196. England’s issue has been what comes next, once the plan has worked. A struggle to adapt mid-series saw them lose to India and Pakistan after winning the first Test. But turning up half-baked is new.
Relevant, surely, is McCullum’s new role, taken up properly at the start of this year. In English cricket, this is the other cycle: whether the national team needs a head coach across formats or whether the role should be split. When they’ve tried the latter, the white-ball coach, and ODI cricket as a whole, has felt sidelined. When they’ve tried the former, the demands of both jobs have been too much. Rob Key insisted, when going all in on McCullum in September 2024, that the schedule was easing, but it is hard to see now what he was referring to. The Ashes was preceded by a white-ball tour of New Zealand, which is part of what hampered preparations for Australia, while England’s multi-format players will spend about a week at home after Sydney before heading back out to Sri Lanka to begin their T20 World Cup prep, only returning again in mid-March. Is it any surprise that England’s laser-focus softened just as McCullum’s job broadened?
Perhaps what is needed is not wholesale change, but a drawing in of the reins. Let McCullum see out the T20 World Cup and then concentrate on the Test team as the target shifts to the 2027 Ashes. Acknowledge that the job might be too big, and also in the process quietly admit he might not be the best man to lead an ODI team that has only become worse and more one-note during his tenure, to the extent that qualification for the next World Cup is not a formality.
Whether this England set-up, so tempted by the big gamble, can countenance such a move is another question. The last three years have been defined by a constant ramping-up, an embracing of the philosophy, and a total commitment to McCullum. Now, with the main prize squandered, is the time to reflect on what can stay and what should go.
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