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The timing of comments from Ben Stokes about his relationship with Brendon McCullum is no coincidence.
With more than seven weeks to go before the first Test against New Zealand at Lord’s, the ECB felt the need to rush out an excerpt from an in-house interview recorded recently, in which Stokes said he and the England coach agree ‘95 per cent of the time’.
He added: ‘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.’
How different was not made clear, nor what that difference would entail, though the message is in keeping with chief executive Richard Gould’s vague assertion a couple of weeks ago that McCullum’s England would ‘adapt and evolve’ after the Ashes fiasco.
But why go public now? A cynic might argue it is because of the publication this week of the latest edition of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack – which I edit, and which contains observations about the Stokes-McCullum dynamic during the two-month Ashes tour.
It was obvious to anyone who reported on that trip that English cricket’s two central figures had begun to diverge for the first time since they joined forces to such remarkable effect in the early summer of 2022.
Until the end of the second Test at Brisbane, they had sung to an almost uncanny degree from the same hymnsheet. But the notes of discord were unmistakable. While Stokes warned after England’s eight-wicket defeat at the Gabba that Australia was ‘not for weak men’, McCullum used his pre-match press conference in Adelaide to urge his team on.
Stokes wanted to knuckle down, and batted accordingly. McCullum did not want to change tack in the middle of the most important series of the Bazball era.
In Wisden’s editorial, which the ECB saw a couple of hours before releasing the Stokes quotes, I wrote: ‘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.’
In his interview, Stokes half-confirms this, while simultaneously playing it down: ‘Agreeing on every single thing, that’s just impossible. Saying we weren’t aligned, I think, is a massive overstatement.’
The concern is that England are fighting fires even before the international summer has begun. Like the dreaded vote of confidence from the football chairman, Stokes’s insistence that he and McCullum can rub along for the benefit of English cricket instinctively raises the question of what will happen if they can’t.
And this is the risk the ECB hierarchy has taken. Last month’s briefing at Lord’s by Gould and managing director Rob Key raised as many issues as it answered, and Gould needed to be pushed for concrete examples of how McCullum had adapted and evolved, eventually pointing out that he had used walkie-talkies to communicate with the players during the white-ball tour of Sri Lanka and the subsequent T20 World Cup.
But Stokes’s comments this morning will do little to persuade England fans that meaningful change can take place this summer, and it is characteristically light on detail, as so many of England’s pronouncements have been since the Ashes.
McCullum, meanwhile, is nowhere to be seen, though we are assured that post-Ashes England will be paying more heed to runs scored and wickets taken in county cricket than pre-Ashes England. Time will tell.
In fairness, Stokes does make a good point. ‘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,’ he says.
‘To me, that 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 discussions. Then you end up getting to the place you both want to end up getting to.’
A bit of creative tension, then: great. The problem is, many people were saying this a while ago – before McCullum stripped England’s backroom staff to the bare minimum and surrounded himself with ‘yes’ men.
He and Stokes may yet channel that discordant 5% into a successful new phase for the Test team, culminating in Ashes glory next summer. It’s just that no one has yet explained in any meaningful fashion how this happens. Until then, England supporters reserve the right to be sceptical.
