Brendon must first stop the rot then find a way to raise the bar
AS New Zealand captain, Brendon Mccullum once set a field containing four slips for a 50-overworld Cup game against England.the idea was to con England into believing that the ball was moving like a drunk on a storm-tossed boat under cloudless skies inwellington.
England were shot out for 123, a total that the Kiwis made mincemeat of once Mccullum had swaggered to the crease and crashed 77 runs off 25 balls, including four successive sixes off Steven Finn.
There, in a nutshell, you have England’s new Test coach.
Aggressive, imaginative, bold.
The England side he takes charge of for the first time at Lord’s on Thursday is fragile, stuck in its ways and weak.
Opposites attract, apparently.well, let’s hope so.
England have lost their last five series and won just one of their last 17 Tests.
Mccullum has to find a way of stopping the rot and turning around the direction of travel, a far-from- straightforward mission with his home country up first in a three-test series.
New Zealand are the world Test champions; England have dropped into the bottom half of the Test-playing nations. It is a mismatch on paper.
The rhythms of England’s home Tests act as the backbeat to the English summer. Success lifts the nation. Not so long ago there was an expectation of it. Up until last summer, you had to scroll back to 2014 for England’s last home series defeat. But belief, both internal and external, has ebbed away on the back of the decline.
The reconstruction process is a challenging one, yet in a sense Mccullum is in the ideal spot for an incoming coach in that things cannot get any worse. Call it the
Ten Hag position. His in-tray, though, is overflowing.
The top-order trouble that has promoted Joe Root to de facto opener so often in recent times remains problem number one.
Zak Crawley and Alex Lees have been entrusted with opening again at Lord’s despite their average partnership in the Test series just
gone againstwest Indies being a paltry 21.
This did, however, represent an improvement on the 18 the various combinations of Rory Burns, Haseeb Hameed and Crawley managed in Australia.
Maybe Mccullum could strap on the pads again.that might help. He still holds the record for the fastest Test century. Likewise, there are fault lines in a bowling attack that has no express pace to speak of, with Jofra Archer and Mark Wood injured, and lacks a top-drawer spinner.
It does have Jimmy Anderson and Stuart Broad back, mind. If their recall hardly smacks of a new broom sweeping through then it does allow England to compete without one hand tied behind their back as they were forced to do by their own scatterbrained selection in the Caribbean.
With no Ollie Robinson or Saqib Mahmood or Matthew Fisher either, it would have been an act of self-harm to voluntarily do without the golden oldies again in English conditions.
Mccullum’s first squad, save for the addition of the in-form Harry Brook and Matty Potts, is a familiar one. If there is a quantity of sticking plaster being applied to the England side then it needs it.
ENGLAND hardly look like world-beaters-in-waiting but Mccullum’s sense is that there is much more that can be squeezed out of this group. He is better known as a one-day coach than a Test coach and will not be a technical, hands-on operator. He is much more of a big-picture kind of guy.
As New Zealand captain, ‘Baz’ breathed life into a nondescript side, injecting it with purpose and positivity.
The no-sledging, no-blame brand of cricket he espoused turned the Black Caps into a side that routinely punched entertainingly above its weight.
As he attempts to drag England in the same direction, Mccullum’s double act with the new captain
Ben Stokes will be pivotal. Stokes is New Zealand-born and spent the first 12 years of his life there.
They are cut from the same cloth and share a similar outlook.
The squad culture will be high on their priorities, one built around freedom of self-expression but within a team-first setting.the midnight curfew imposed on the England squad will go – on the assumption they will not use it as a free pass to go out clubbing until 4am onwednesday night.
Raising the bar for England on the field after the disappointments of recent series will be a more difficult business altogether.*