There will be consequences. There must be consequences. Perhaps there have already been consequences. Harry Brook is very sorry for getting punched by a bouncer in New Zealand. Rob Key is very sorry for overseeing an Ashes tour that in retrospect could probably have been an email. Brendon McCullum is not sorry, but has promised to “look at things over the next little while”, which is basically the same as an apology, so fine.
In the meantime, the travelling circus of English cricket rolls on. There is a white-ball series in Sri Lanka starting on Thursday morning, for which – consequences, remember – McCullum remains as coach, Key remains as managing director and Brook remains as captain. In addition Zak Crawley returns to open the batting in the 50-over team, a fitting reward for not playing a single 50-over game in the whole of 2024 or 2025. Nature heals.
Perhaps we do, too. Two weeks after the teams left the field in Sydney, the raw emotions awakened by England’s defeat have subsided a little. Sleep and teabags have been replenished. The Twenty20 World Cup starts in a fortnight. Winter nets have already begun. This is the blessing and the curse of cricket: there is always fresh hope around the corner, fresh drifts of snow to cover guilty footprints.
As for McCullum, his contract runs to the end of the 2027 Ashes and according to reports it would cost more than £1m to break it now. Indeed it is possible that this knowledge has informed some of his more obdurate proclamations to the media in Australia, a recognition that in a landscape rich with franchise cash and poor in willing international coaches, he still holds all the cards.
The first point to make here is that losing in Australia should not in itself be a sackable offence. Losing in Australia is just something that happens, often and to everyone, like nasal hair and hiccups. Exceptions: one of the finest Indian teams in history, scraping a couple of 2-1 victories with the help of an all-time fast bowling freak and a playing base of half a billion. Before that, a South African team containing at least half a dozen hall-of-famers. Perhaps one of the reasons English cricket keeps finding itself back in this situation is its stubborn habit of insisting on generational greatness as the bar for employment.
None of which is to defend England’s sorry excuse for a campaign, which looked bad and felt even worse, a recurring nightmare in which Ollie Pope is driving on the up for ever, in which Travis Head is still flaying Brydon Carse to the square leg boundary. Somehow carelessness feels even less forgivable than ineptitude, which may explain the particularly vindictive strain of criticism this side have been made to endure. Bloodlust, vengeance, punishment beatings: this feels pure and real. We will flog you until you care as much as we do.
All the same, perhaps it is worth retracing the steps that brought us here. Should it surprise us that a team renowned for lax preparation and loose shots prepared laxly and shot loosely? Was it really so unforeseeable that a team reared on a no-consequence culture should act as if consequences were alien to them? If it walks like a Bazball and talks like a Bazball, then maybe assume it also wafts in the eighth-stump corridor like a Bazball.
Long before Adelaide and Perth and Noosa, there were Rawalpindi and Headingley and the bucket hats and the kebabs, the Nighthawk and winning by, I dunno, 150 runs. From its very conception Bazball was a nonsensical response to a largely nonsensical set of circumstances: a team traumatised by Covid bubbles and haunted by death and decay, a declining player base, an apathetic public, an international game being pecked to bits by franchise cricket. In the face of disaster, choose nihilism. In a results-based business, disregard results entirely.
Bazball succeeded because it was based on a lie, and so perhaps it was doomed to fail for the same reasons. But have any of the prevailing winds really shifted in the last four years? Is it remotely possible to recreate 2010-11 in a world of 12-month franchise contracts, when the entire month of August is now majority-owned by Indian entrepreneurs?
Of the under-19 squad currently playing in the World Cup in Harare, only four did not come through the private school system, where you are eight times more likely to have access to a turf pitch and 10 times more likely to have a qualified coach. The £35m in grassroots funding announced by Rishi Sunak in 2024 turned out not to exist. The sale of the eight Hundred franchises raised more than £500m, but Sussex have just been put into special financial measures.
English cricket remains a metaphor for the country at large: hollowed out and stripped down, a place of VIP queues and boarded-up high streets, pristine public school fields and “no ball games” signs on housing estates. A place where people are slowly tuning out, living paycheck to paycheck, bored of experts.
Perhaps McCullum will eventually fall on his six-iron, an appropriate-sized human sacrifice. Perhaps Bazball has already breathed its last, destined to be replaced by some southern hemisphere pragmatist in reflective sunglasses. But if the truth hurts, what real harm is there in maintaining the lie? If the consequences are too painful, why bother? Whether Ben Stokes and McCullum and Key are the best men for the job is a matter for debate. Whether they are the right men is inarguable. In the end, after all, a country gets the cricket team it deserves.