Andrew Miller – England’s Brendon McCullum era may have run out of road

However, seeing as Brook has played under precisely two head coaches in the course of his four-year international career, that was arguably a more damning indictment of his old white-ball boss Matthew Mott than a fully objective vote of confidence in his current one.

Okay, so that’s a slightly flippant take, but it points to an underlying truth. What exactly does Brook know at this still-early juncture of his career, and what might he still need to learn as his stature continues to grow, both within the England dressing-room but also, increasingly, on the global stage? And, after what the head coach himself admitted had been a “challenging” winter across formats, is McCullum really the man most likely to impart the necessary wisdom?

Brook has learned plenty already this winter of course, although not all of it willingly, and to judge by McCullum’s ongoing annoyance that Brook’s run-in with a Wellington nightclub bouncer was ever made public, his coach too would rather he hadn’t been forced to undergo quite such a public lesson in humility.

And so, without wishing to get bogged down in semantics, it feels odd for the coach to hail his players’ maturity after heeding “a really tough lesson”, and to speak proudly of “being in the business of building men for life”, while at the same time wishing that they had all remained cocooned in the Baz-bubble, answerable to nothing and no one other than their urges to “go harder”.

Such are the contradictions at the heart of an England set-up that once knew its own hive-mind so intimately, there was simply no point in debating its direction of travel. For the first two years of McCullum’s tenure (Bazball 1.0 if you will) the conditions for his Svengali-like stewardship were absolutely perfect, and the achievements of that epoch deserve to be celebrated long after the details have been forgotten.

But they cannot and will not be repeated, and therefore, as the ECB embarks on what it promised would be a “thorough” post-Ashes review, it would be remiss not to recognise the sea-change that the men’s squads – red and white-ball alike – have undergone since 2022.

That original red-ball environment worked precisely because its core players possessed a lifetime’s worth of experience to frame the narrative, not least the captain, Ben Stokes, whose own nightclub misdemeanour, in Bristol in 2017, could scarcely have developed into a more existential learning process.

His team could play fast and loose with its parameters, and push Test cricket’s staid old boundaries, safe in the knowledge that their bedrock of professionalism had long since been learned the hard way. For a fleeting but glorious moment in time, Stokes and his senior colleagues chose to stop worrying about the consequences of failure, and repurposed their team as a blank canvas in which its newcomers – Brook included – were encouraged to indulge in guilt-free self-expression.

It’s not so simple now. Brook’s performances in the 2025-26 Ashes – 358 runs from 438 balls across ten innings, with nine scores above 15 but none beyond 84 – epitomised a player who had been conditioned to run towards the danger in the Baz-prescribed manner, but lacked the hinterland to recognise that his team-mates, new and old, were no longer able or willing to come with him.

The reasons for their reticence were many and varied. Some suffered for a basic lack of experience in Australian conditions, in the absence of Bazball OGs including James Anderson, Stuart Broad and Jonny Bairstow. Others, most notably Ollie Pope, endured a paralysing attack of vertigo, having had their centrality to the project called into question all year long, not least because of the justifiable punt that McCullum had taken on Jacob Bethell the previous winter.

And so, if it’s clear that the magic was gone by the time the Ashes were lost, then it’s hard to argue that a flawed but valiant showing at the T20 World Cup is evidence that it has somehow made a reappearance.

For starters, McCullum is arguably hamstrung in his white-ball role, for much the same reasons that his predecessor, the aforementioned Mott, was never truly able to get his feet under the table. His appointment, also in 2022, had been made with one captain in mind, the towering authority figure of Eoin Morgan, but lasted less than one trip to the Netherlands before Morgan decided his time was up, and handed the reins over to the less demonstrative Jos Buttler

Similarly, when McCullum embarked on his twin brief in January 2025, his stated aim was to cheer up a “miserable” Jos Buttler – who, for all his woes, was exactly the sort of long-in-the-tooth professional who should, in theory, have benefitted from a Baz bigging-up. Instead, that alliance was dead on its feet by the time of their Champions Trophy debacle in March, and now Buttler’s overall England career seems in an equally terminal condition – which, if you’re looking for reasons to be positive about McCullum’s influence, is frankly anything but.

McCullum has since had to deny that his set-up is a “casual operation” but, again, such structural complaints would not have been a factor had the gravitas of England’s most-capped cricketer been on hand to underpin his regime. Instead, Harry Brook is having to learn on the hoof, and if – as McCullum acknowledged – his team had developed something of an “identity” by the end of their World Cup campaign, it’s hard to see any area (other than maybe a nudge for Brook to move up to No.3) where the coach has had an active input.

Strategically, there’s the terror of England’s near-misses against Nepal and Italy, which don’t exactly imply that the players all felt “10,000 feet tall” as they walked out to face the music. Moreover there’s the style of play – spin-heavy, as if taking Brook’s own relative discomfort against slow bowling and projecting it onto their opponents, whereas McCullum’s original gameplan for subcontinental white-ball cricket, only 12 months earlier, had been a churn of 90mph quicks and ten defeats out of 11 across formats.

That U-turn could, of course, be taken as proof of a lively and reactive mind, were it not for the fact that one of the few seamers now in England’s best XI is Sam Curran, a player who actively believed his face did not fit the McCullum mould. He appeared to have been ostracised from all three formats because he was neither six-feet tall nor 90mph-plus … unlike Jamie Overton, of course: a McCullum hunch pick right from the moment of his one-off Test debut in 2022, but a player whose immense attributes haven’t yet delivered the performances that his coach clearly hopes to coax out of him.

McCullum himself cut a phlegmatic figure after England’s T20 World Cup loss to India. It was, on the one hand, a performance that lived and breathed the McCullum mantra. Bravery and aggression with the bat, a willingness to run towards the danger, a refusal to believe that any run-chase was out of their reach – on this occasion, a tournament-record target of 254.

And yet, their journey to that point had been one of self-discovery, not self-belief, and it still ended up being out of their reach, just as the Ashes had proven to be. And now, as McCullum returns home to New Zealand to “watch fast horses and play some shocking golf”, it’s time to take stock and work out which parts – if any – of his project are worth salvaging.

Magnificent though the vibes have been, the time may have come for England to reboot their operation, and this time with more substance.

Andrew Miller is UK editor of ESPNcricinfo. @miller_cricket

Source link