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Brendon McCullum has stressed his desire to stay on as England head coach but acknowledged this is now a question for those higher up.
Australia winning this much-anticipated Ashes series at the earliest opportunity has thrust McCullum’s role into the spotlight but with a multi-format contract that runs up to the end of the 50-over World Cup in late 2027, removing him would cost English cricket a seven-figure sum.
Senior figures at the England and Wales Cricket Board are understood to be wary of making wholesale changes but with Australia now openly targeting a third home whitewash this century as the series moves to Melbourne and then Sydney, McCullum and the team director, Rob Key, are under pressure.
Asked if he expected to be in the role come the English summer, McCullum replied: “I don’t know. It’s not really up to me, is it? I will just keep trying to do the job, try to learn the lessons that I haven’t quite got right here and make adjustments. Those questions are for someone else, not for me.
“It’s a pretty good gig. It’s good fun. You travel the world with the lads and try to play some exciting cricket and try to achieve some things. For me, it’s a matter of trying to just get the very best out of the people and try to achieve what you can with them. Those other decisions are up to other people. I think we’ve made some progress from when I took over to where we are.”
With Key having extended McCullum’s deal in 2024 and expanded his brief to include the white-ball teams, their fates may well be intertwined and not helped by 21 defeats in 39 games across all formats this calendar year.
Among the questions swirling after the 82-run defeat at Adelaide Oval is whether McCullum and the captain, Ben Stokes, remain on the same page. At 2-0 down, Stokes suddenly ordered his players to show “fight” and a flat pitch that England would usually look to attack was met with caution: 286 all out in 87.2 overs represented their slowest first innings under the current regime.
Asked if the players still believed in his methods, McCullum replied: “I hope so. You’ll have to ask them. For the last few years, we’ve had a team which has understood how we’re going about this style and we put this team together based on the skill level and the talent [required]. That’s not going to change during the time that I’m still in the job.
“I will always have the back of my players, always support them and I’ll always make sure that I’m protective of them as well in a public forum. That doesn’t mean you don’t challenge them privately.
“The style has never been about the scoring rates. We have never said we are going to try to score at 5.5/6 an over. It’s about allowing us to get in the head space where we are clear, transparent and immersed in the situation and the moment so we can identify risk, where the game is at and what is required.
“For the first nine days [of the series] I felt we were incredibly tight, tense and desperate to perform and succeed. That desperation is great, but not if it puts the handbrake on your ability to let your talent and game come out.”
As a head coach who has always maintained his methods relate to the “top two inches” – ie mindset – rather than technical coaching, this “desperation” does fall on McCullum. England’s mid-tour break in the holiday town of Noosa is also likely to be the subject of questions inside the ECB given the headlines it generated at the time (and the fact the reset did not work out on the field).
Richard Thompson, the ECB chair, is currently in Australia, with the chief executive, Richard Gould, due to be on the ground in Sydney. Both took on their roles after Key and McCullum were appointed in 2022 but there is still time to change perceptions in the final two Tests of this Ashes tour and, if given the chance, the T20 World Cup in India and Sri Lanka next year.
McCullum said: “If we can just play, again, just find that beautiful state you can get in where you’re not restricted by the pressures and the expectations of everything ... acknowledge all of that and accept that it’s going to be there ... but then just go out and when you cross the line, go out and just play the game ... then we give ourselves a better chance.
“This [defeat] is going to sting, no doubt. But we know we’ve got a job to do in Melbourne and in Sydney. If we can salvage something out of the next two Test matches, then that’s something.”
England are due to resume training at the MCG on Tuesday morning with Jacob Bethell and Gus Atkinson, two of the unused players in Adelaide, now in contention to play on Boxing Day.
