Wisden Almanack editor: England ‘feckless, reckless and legless’ in 2025/26 Ashes

England arrived for the Ashes hell-bent on making history, and ended up being laughed out of town. Some of this comes with the territory. Humiliating the Poms is a national sport in Australia – doubly so this time, since Bazball had become a second enemy, and scores remained unsettled after a fractious 2023 series. Yet much of the misery was self-inflicted: from the paper-thin preparation, via a string of schoolboy dismissals, to the revelation of Harry Brook’s scrape with a nightclub bouncer in New Zealand. England were feckless, reckless and legless. A trip supposed to define an era, described by Brendon McCullum as “the biggest series of all our lives”, descended into dilettantism. What a waste. What a shame.

England have struggled in Australia often enough, but rarely has the locals’ derision been matched, possibly surpassed, by their own supporters’ contempt. Having spent a fortune to fly south for the winter, they were appalled to find a team whose guiding principle seemed to have been borrowed from amateur dramatics: it’ll be all right on the night. But even unpaid actors nail some of their lines. From Perth to Sydney, England fluffed the big moments, alleviated only by winning a two-day roll of the dice at Melbourne. In the game’s long history, it is hard to think of a privilege so carelessly squandered, a chance so blithely spurned.

Of the hosts’ long-established bowling quartet, Nathan Lyon played just two Tests, Pat Cummins one, Josh Hazlewood none. Even Steve Smith missed a game. Travis Head and Mitchell Starc were outstanding, but only half a dozen Australians really chipped in – more than enough against an England team who survived off scraps. Joe Root scored his first hundreds Down Under; Jofra Archer took a five-for, but broke down again; Ben Stokes bowled well, but ditto; Josh Tongue and Jacob Bethell flourished, but played only five Tests between them, when it should have been nine or ten. A successful assault on Australia requires blood, sweat and tears, not dribs, drabs and vibes.

The damage was done early, and never repaired. The inadequacy of England’s warm-up – a white-ball tour of chilly New Zealand that undermined the top order’s confidence, plus a three-day knockabout against a mediocre Lions side at Lilac Hill – was exposed during their second-day collapse at Perth, where one batsman after another drove on the up, Australian cricket’s cardinal sin. The same mistakes condemned them to defeat at Brisbane.

All the while, England grew confused. In the first two Tests, they forgot a crucial part of the Bazball mantras – to soak up pressure when necessary. Instead, they kept attacking Starc, the very bowler they should have tried to see off. That prompted Stokes to warn that Australia was “not for weak men”: suddenly fearful of failure, his team retreated into passivity. At Adelaide, with the pitch flat and the temperature 40°C, their new-found timidity was terribly timed. And while Stokes began to resemble Frodo Baggins en route to Mount Doom, McCullum was Dorothy on the Yellow Brick Road, insistent good things lay ahead. The messaging was mixed, the upshot inevitable. For the first time in the Bazball era, England’s opponents scored more quickly than they did. After all the hype, the Ashes were over in 11 days.

Strategies disintegrated. Shoaib Bashir had been groomed as the first-choice slow bowler for 18 months, only for the management to turn to the part-time off-breaks of Will Jacks, because he strengthened the batting. Ollie Pope had long been an accident waiting to happen, obvious to everyone bar Stokes. And the enduring faith in Zak Crawley was based on outdated intel: Australia’s pitches had not been flat for several seasons, neutering him at source. His opening partnership with Ben Duckett, meanwhile, was supposed to be England’s catalyst. But Crawley averaged 27, and Duckett 20 – a catalyst, certainly, but not as intended.

The fast bowlers fell by the wayside, as if in formation. Mark Wood dropped out after the first Test, Archer after the third, Gus Atkinson during the fourth. Brydon Carse was praised by Stokes for running in, but that was surely the first line of his job description, and Carse was no new-ball bowler. Matthew Potts, picked after negligible match practice, was taken apart in Sydney.

Without a fielding coach, England dropped catches. Without a wicketkeeping coach, Jamie Smith looked lost. Without a long-term bowling coach, the attack were rudderless. Without a batting coach preaching smarter strokeplay, only three players averaged over 28. These were the wing-and-a-prayer Ashes, and England got what they deserved.

A very English headache

Brook’s nightclub fracas the evening before leading his country in a one-day international in Wellington was daft enough. But it was another level of stupidity for the management to spend ten weeks covering it up. Had they come clean immediately, the English game might have engaged in a meaningful debate about its relationship with alcohol, and softened the headlines in Australia. Instead, Brook was allowed to delay his mea culpa until the eve of the white-ball series in Sri Lanka in late January, when it emerged that England had imposed a curfew – the off-field equivalent of naughty-boy nets and, in a quieter part of the world, almost as pointless.

Even his apology needed another apology, after it emerged he had lied – to protect team-mates – about trying to get into the nightclub alone. It was a small detail, but it betrayed a bigger picture. Having been part of a dressing-room that pushed the boundaries, on and off the field, he was now having to say sorry for fibs approved by those above him – and only because journalists had asked awkward questions. The cover-up had overtaken the crime, and the second cover-up overtaken the first. No one could rule out a third. Brook kept apologising, but who was advising him? When we finally heard from McCullum, at the end of the Sri Lanka tour, he dismissed coverage of the story as “quite annoying”.

The link between Brits and booze is nothing new: English cricketers have always enjoyed a drink, and the Bazballers have run towards the danger. While the Test team were winning, their bar bills were just about tolerated by senior figures at the ECB. But it was a fragile arrangement, only a few defeats from turning happy hour into last-chance saloon. No one could accuse England of operating in a high-performance environment. Mitchell Starc, by contrast, swore off alcohol for the duration of the Ashes. Was it really so hard?

Three weeks before the Perth Test was plenty of time to hold Brook to account in public, and remind the players that they had a (well-paid) job to do in Australia. Instead, they swept Wellington under the carpet, and proceeded with the best-planned part of the tour – the R & R between the second and third Tests in Noosa, a pint-sized resort on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast that now has an infamous place in Ashes lore. Consisting of a beach and a main road, it was ideal for phone-wielding fans looking to make a splash on social media. When Ben Duckett was filmed barely able to speak, the narrative had its fall guy. Four years after England’s previous Ashes misadventure had sparked headlines about a drinking culture, it was all depressingly familiar.

Asking the players to drink less might not have helped them beat Australia. But it would have mitigated the perception they were not fit for purpose. Who knows, it might have allowed Brook to perform in Australia with a clearer head. Had fear of exposure distracted him? Or was the distraction a symptom of impunity, after he had escaped with a fine and a warning? We’ll never know. Worse, England did not give themselves the chance to find out.

Bazfall

When McCullum assumed the Test job in 2022, he represented not so much a breath of fresh air as a wind of change. And, for a while, England blew apart convention. But a pattern emerged. Against non-Big Three opponents, they won 19 Tests and lost six, including two with the series already in the bag. Against Australia or India, they won seven and lost 12, twice drawing 2-2 at home, twice losing 4-1 away. The two draws, it’s true, had elements of bad fortune. In the 2023 Ashes, Manchester rain ruined hopes of an astonishing series win. And, at The Oval last summer, they spent four days of the decisive Test against India competing with ten men after Chris Woakes dislocated his shoulder, but they still came within seven of chasing down 374.

Yet, by Stokes’s own admission, they grew predictable, with the opposition needing only to spread the field and wait for the ball to go in the air. They grew dogmatic, believing the light-touch approach of five previous tours, when they had won the first Test each time, would work in Australia. And they grew deaf to reason, so allergic to “outside noise” that McCullum pared the backroom staff to a barely functioning minimum, and Stokes dismissed explayers voicing constructive criticism as “has-beens”. They ran out of ideas – and friends. It didn’t matter that only WG Grace, Douglas Jardine and Mike Brearley had a better win percentage among England captains with ten Tests: by losing the room, Stokes had nowhere to go.

He can win it back. First, England must find an identity somewhere between the straitjacket and the bucket hat, since inhibition can be as self-defeating as abandon. Release from the fear of failure is a noble aim, and it would be a mistake to tell Brook to tear up the technique that has brought him England’s highest Test average since Ken Barrington. But an environment lacking accountability isn’t much use either. Second, they must restore the links with a county game that remains imperfect but is the only finishing school they have. That is not just pragmatism: it is vital to the sense that any of this matters, that runs and wickets in domestic cricket are the surest route to international recognition, that the structure is working. Stokes is smart enough to see all this. Now he just needs to stay fit for the 2027 Ashes.

You’ve made your bed…

When Chris Silverwood was sacked as England coach four years ago, after the previous tour of Australia, it was widely agreed an all-format role had become too much for one man. But with a little over a year before the Ashes began, at a moment when McCullum should have been wearing his Test-match blinkers, managing director Rob Key united the roles once more.

With England under pressure to turn round their one-day fortunes during the tour of New Zealand, McCullum insisted on taking his strongest side – a boon rarely enjoyed by his white-ball predecessor, Matthew Mott. It meant that two players in need of rest, Ben Duckett and Jamie Smith, stayed on the treadmill. In New Zealand, they averaged less than five between them, and landed in Australia not just out of form, but out of breath.

There was a problem after the Ashes, too. With the T20 World Cup fast approaching, England were unable to be decisive about McCullum’s future, despite the sense that the Test team were no longer responding to his blandishments, and despite his own misgivings about carrying on the job without complete control. The white-ball role came his way too quickly – and with little apparent thought of the consequences.

Cracked it!

By the time England next contest the Ashes, Root should be closing in on the Test runs record, having silenced the trollosphere about his stats in Australia. The criticism was always a bit of a stretch, since he averaged 35 there, not 25, and he showed what he made of it when he reached three figures at Brisbane – a shrug of the shoulders that suggested he should not have been the story. At Sydney, he proved it was no fluke. While Harry Brook’s failure to readjust on the second morning to an SCG pitch that had quickened up cost him the chance of a first Ashes hundred, Root played himself in all over again, and went on to 160. He was already in the debate about Britain’s greatest sports stars. Brook can join him, if he pays attention.

Park life

Cricket is everywhere during the Australian summer, from TV ads in which the players’ familiarity is a given, to the recreational matches round every corner during the walk to the Test match: in Moore Park by the SCG, Sydney Greeks v Sydney Pakistanis looked tasty. The Ashes were watched by over 850,000 spectators; with an extra day or two at Perth and Melbourne, it would have topped a million. Australia is a cricket country, in the most self-affirming way.

Can England say the same thing? Last year’s success story came off the field, when private investors bid over half a billion pounds for the Hundred franchises. But amid talk of safeguarding the future, the present looked shaky. Never mind the men’s Test team: the men’s ODI team were eighth in the rankings, even after a series win in Sri Lanka; the women were falling behind their competitors, despite the feel-good appointment as head coach of Charlotte Edwards; and the Lions impressed no one during their tour of Australia. What good is a shiny new interior when the shop window is so grubby?

Day/night robbery

Test cricket turns 150 next year – not bad for a format said to be forever on the brink. But the decision to mark the anniversary by making Australia and England play a pink-ball match, at the MCG, is a stinker. Worse was the justification, which took fans for fools. Everyone knew it was about maximising the local TV audience, yet Cricket Australia chief executive Todd Greenberg insisted he wanted to reflect the game’s evolution. What evolution, exactly? By the end of the Ashes, only 25 of the 2,616 Test matches had been day/night affairs, and 14 hosted by Australia, who have gratefully exploited the competitive advantage. Floodlit Test cricket was worth a try, but only one country takes it seriously. Joe Root was right when he said the Ashes didn’t need a floodlit match, and the ECB should resist this act of cynicism.

Grounds for complaint

England’s 2-2 draw with India was hailed as one of the great Test series, and the finishes at Lord’s (England won by 22 runs) and The Oval (India by six) were classics. But too much of the cricket in between lacked drama – partly because the players had lost confidence in the quality of the Dukes ball, mainly because pitches had become slow and lifeless through overuse. Ben Stokes’s attempts at diplomacy became a sport in their own right, and he didn’t always succeed, calling Edgbaston “a subcontinent pitch” after England lost the second Test. His frustration was understandable: their summer was spent squandering home advantage, with chief executives preferring drab five-day surfaces to greentops that risked two days’ revenue.

No other Test nation would countenance such hospitality. Yet British groundstaff now face an impossible schedule following the introduction of The Hundred and the rise of the women’s game. Last summer, The Oval provided the only Test surface to enhance its reputation.

At Lord’s, MCC have opted for a bold step: drop-in pitches, often regarded with sniffiness, but perhaps now the only way out of an impasse that is in danger of robbing English Test cricket of its essence. If everything goes to plan, England could be playing on a drop-in by 2029 – and other venues may have to follow suit.

Slight of hand

Was there a clearer indictment of the game’s governance in 2025 than Pakistan Cricket Board chairman Mohsin Naqvi’s assertion that “politics and sport can’t go together”? Presumably he had forgotten he was also his country’s interior minister, though in the blurring of spheres he was hardly alone. Indeed, Naqvi was responding to an egregious example of political intrusion – India’s refusal to shake hands with their Pakistani opponents during the Asia Cup in the Gulf, whose previous USP had been as a refuge from realpolitik.

It was obvious long before this latest grandstanding that the BCCI were the sporting adjunct of India’s ruling BJP. But the relationship became explicit when India captain Suryakumar Yadav dedicated the first of his side’s three Asia Cup wins over Pakistan to the armed forces. A few months earlier, terrorists had killed 26 in Indian-administered Kashmir, leading to a brief military conflict, complete with codenamed assaults.

And the idea that cricket was now a legitimate proxy for more lethal activity was hammered home on X by India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, after his country beat Pakistan in the final: “Operation Sindoor on the games field. Outcome is the same – India wins!” The real-world Operation Sindoor had left dozens dead, on both sides of the border. Now it was being equated with a game of T20. Suryakumar lapped it up, suggesting “it feels good when the country’s leader himself bats on the front foot – it felt like he took the strike and scored runs”.

If India were so appalled by Pakistan, they should simply have refused to play them. Instead, they opted for humiliation. But it was all performative: before the public snub, the captains had shaken hands in private. And when the two nations’ Under-21 hockey teams met soon after in Malaysia, the game ended with hugs and high-fives. Cricket has become an important piece on the BJP’s geopolitical chessboard, and the Asia Cup descended into tit-for-tat farce, with players on both sides making tasteless gestures about fighter planes, and India refusing to take the stage to receive the trophy from Naqvi (whose busy portfolio includes the presidency of the Asian Cricket Council). At the time of writing, the trophy is thought to be under lock and key in the UAE, a neat symbol of international cricket’s dysfunction.

There was worse to come. At the start of 2026, the BCCI ordered Kolkata Knight Riders to release fast bowler Mustafizur Rahman, who had fetched $1m at the IPL auction, the only Bangladeshi selected. It was retaliation for the murder of Hindu men in Bangladesh, and a shot across the bows of KKR’s Bollywood owner Shah Rukh Khan – a Muslim, and a regular target of Hindu nationalists. The fate of Mustafizur confirmed cricket’s descent into the hands of its political masters, just as Suryakumar embodied its acquiescence.

It wasn’t over yet, with the Bangladesh government telling their cricketers not to travel to India for the T20 World Cup because of security concerns. Faced with a similar situation in 2025, when India refused to visit Pakistan for the Champions Trophy, and insisted on playing all their games in Dubai, the ICC had bent over backwards to accommodate them. But Bangladesh were kicked out of the tournament – despite their request to move games to co-hosts Sri Lanka. Indian apologists were quick to deny the equivalence, arguing that the BCCI had given the ICC more notice than the Bangladesh board, as if that deserved a pat on the back.

When Pakistan’s government announced on February 1 that their team would not fulfil their World Cup fixture against India in Colombo a fortnight later, the move felt like a desperate and utterly self-defeating response to serial provocation. The global game was on a precipice. Yet the ICC, now dominated by Indian voices and fearful of a catastrophic loss of TV revenue, issued a mind-boggling statement which pretended the Champions Trophy fiasco had never occurred. ICC events, they claimed with a straight face, were “built on sporting integrity, competitiveness, consistency and fairness, and selective participation undermines the spirit and sanctity of the competitions”. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Pakistan eventually agreed to play the game, but their brinkmanship had exposed the fragility of cricket’s finances.

The sport’s governance grows ever more Orwellian, pretending that Indian exceptionalism comes without consequence, and blaming those lower down the food chain for lashing out. Predictably, almost no prominent voices in the Indian game addressed the root cause of the carnage: the politicisation of a sport that, whatever Naqvi may say, has never been untouched by the real world, yet never more poisoned by it either.

Good night – and good luck

Indian leadership can still be benevolent. When Virat Kohli announced his Test retirement in May, he provided the old format with a fresh endorsement. The five-day game, he wrote on Instagram, had “tested me, shaped me, and taught me lessons I’ll carry for life”. His farewell then took an unexpected turn: “There’s something deeply personal about playing in whites. The quiet grind, the long days, the small moments that no one sees but that stay with you for ever.” It was a touching tribute, even while Kohli identified the qualities that threaten to make Test cricket an anachronism.

Money for new rope

Last year, these pages argued that the windfall generated by the sale of the Hundred franchises left room – “just about” – for scepticism. And amid the relief of counties such as Gloucestershire and Yorkshire, who finally found themselves debt-free, came a story all the more sobering for its timing: Sussex had been placed in special measures for financial mismanagement. Among the issues that had landed them in trouble were spiralling player wages – no surprise, perhaps, for a team determined to make a splash in their first season back in Division One for a decade. They finished fourth, too, apparently cementing the image of a small club, well run.

But they are county cricket’s coal-mine canary, and one of five clubs said to be in the ECB’s sustainability-ratings “red zone” – a reminder that the £25m-£30m handout generated for each club by the Hundred sale must not be swallowed up by a wage-related arms race. It is the reason the ECB have imposed “guardrails”, requiring counties to submit a business plan before they can access the cash.

Yet it is wrong that, for some clubs – in the words of a figure close to the financial shake-up – fighting for the Championship is, paradoxically, the worst outcome, since it can suck up expenditure for relatively little financial reward. Nottinghamshire, the victors, picked up £540,000 for lifting a trophy that may require up to 56 days’ cricket. Oval Invincibles men, meanwhile, pocketed £150,000 for winning The Hundred, possible in fewer than 1,800 balls. A solution to this imbalance is obvious: make investment in the Championship worthwhile by using Hundred income to top up prize money.

That would also allay concerns which have been repeatedly played down by the ECB: once the glow of the initial payout has vanished, the competition’s new ownership structure risks turning The Hundred into an IPL proxy event, more for the benefit of Indian businessmen than English cricket. Three name changes left no doubt about the direction of travel: Oval Invincibles were rechristened Mumbai Indians London; Northern Superchargers became Sunrisers Leeds; and Manchester Originals morphed into Manchester Super Giants. That led to a social-media clip in which MSG’s Jos Buttler tried to sound excited about the elephant on his team’s new badge – a creature rarely seen in the North-West outside Chester Zoo.

The use of Hundred funds to make the red-ball game more attractive would give the whole of the English game, and not just the franchise-owning counties, a stake in the competition’s success. Because whether traditionalists like it or not, it has to succeed.

Last of a breed

In late September, the Daily Mirror reckoned there were two stories in town. Their front page splashed on a rant at the United Nations by Donald Trump, while above him – and of greater significance to English readers – was Dickie Bird, who had died at the age of 92. The larger of two images had Dickie gesticulating at something or other: the sun’s reflection off a greenhouse no one had previously spotted, perhaps, or a random drain, inexplicably overflowing. The smaller image had him proudly brandishing his MBE, or possibly his OBE (even royal experts lost track). Both were utterly characteristic.

And it said everything about Bird’s place in the national psyche that he was still regarded as news, nearly three decades after his last Test match. Some thought his fussing a bit of an act, and bowlers were keen to avoid his end: DRS would have exposed his suspicion that everything was missing leg. But that was hardly the point. The finality of the umpire’s word appealed to an audience beyond cricket, especially from a vulnerable eccentric who took his job seriously without patronising the players. The game will struggle to produce another Dickie.

Change the record

When Wiaan Mulder declared South Africa’s innings at 626-5 against Zimbabwe at Bulawayo in July, he was on 367, and closing in on Brian Lara’s Test-record 400 not out against England in Antigua over 20 years earlier. And there was plenty of time left in the game. He stuck to his guns: “If I get the chance again, I’d probably do the same thing.” But will the chance ever come? This was only Mulder’s third Test hundred, and the others had been against Zimbabwe (the previous week) and Bangladesh. He was not even guaranteed a place in South Africa’s full-strength team.

Why was he so squeamish? After all, there was precedent for playing Zimbabwe and breaking a record set by Lara against England in Antigua: in October 2003 at Perth, Australia’s Matthew Hayden had no such qualms, bruising his way past Lara’s 375. Mulder should have followed Hayden’s example. Lara agreed, instinctively grasping the fact that – no matter the opposition – records are cheapened if players go out of their way not to break them.

State of play

From time to time, you still hear Wisden’s schools section described as the “public schools” section, which it hasn’t been since 1979, though it’s true the independent sector is still dominant. We wish it were otherwise, and happily include the results of state schools who take cricket seriously. The problem is there aren’t many – for a variety of reasons. But moves are afoot, chief among them the introduction this summer of the Knight–Stokes Cup, named after two of England’s greatest state-educated cricketers. It is an MCC-run tournament limited to state secondaries, with a finals day for both boys and girls at Lord’s in September. There have been an impressive 1,100 entrants from 820 schools, reckoned to be a fifth of all state institutions in the UK. Of those, 400 are girls’ teams, in many cases the first established in their schools.

Cricket scholarships have slightly skewed the perception that the English game is reliant on private education: Joe Root started out at King Ecgbert School before switching to fee-paying Worksop College, while Harry Brook made the journey from Ilkley Grammar to Sedbergh. But it continues to damage cricket’s chances of being a truly national sport that these moves are necessary. MCC already have their Foundation Hubs scheme, allowing state schools use of the facilities of their private-sector neighbours. Good on them for this latest initiative.

Running repairs

On the frantic last morning of the Test series at The Oval, England were 19 short of a 3-1 victory against India when Josh Tongue, haring through for a leg-bye, was given lbw to Prasidh Krishna. England overturned the decision, but the on-field ruling cost them the extra. Why should the batting team be denied a run, or even four, because the umpire has erred? One day, this absurdity will strike at a more crucial moment, and cricket will wonder why it stood idly by.

Teenage kicks

As Vaibhav Suryavanshi tore apart the England attack in the final of the Under-19 World Cup at Harare in February, it was tempting to ask whether any team would beat India ever again. Despite being the game’s youngest player – either 14 or 16, depending on your source – he batted with such power and style that his 80-ball 175, with 15 sixes, felt like a man against boys. Suryavanshi already has an IPL contract, and a 35-ball century, and could break all manner of records. “Sir, if I can hit a ball for six,” he once said to a childhood coach, “why would I take a single off it?” Giving him a single may be the best hope of keeping him quiet over the next couple of decades.

There’s hope for us all

At Karachi in January came confirmation that no team should ever give up. Set 40 to beat Pakistan Television in the President’s Trophy, Sui Northern Gas Pipelines Limited were bowled out for 37, in roughly the time it takes to say their name. The previous-lowest fourth-innings total successfully defended had been 41, by Oldfield in 1794 against MCC, who were skittled for 34. As another English summer creaks into action, it was a reminder that, even after 230-odd years, cricket can still surprise us.

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