Last year, England’s winter started in New Zealand, where preparation for their first game in any format for nearly a month amounted to two relaxed training sessions, a cultural welcome ceremony involving local Māori elders and, before that, a team-bonding mini-break in Queenstown.
“Obviously there was a bit of golf played and a few drinks here and there and team meals and whatnot,” Harry Brook said of that trip. “It was just about trying to spend a bit of time together. They’ve got some amazing golf courses and we were lucky enough to get on a couple of them. A couple of the other lads managed to get out and enjoy Queenstown. Everybody had a lot of fun.”
Brook was not aware, as he answered that question, that the way England choose to prepare for their tours was to become one of the defining issues of the trip. A month after he had been on a golf course in Queenstown, Brook was in the sleepy, leafy Perth suburb of Caversham, where England played their one Ashes warm-up fixture against the Lions at Lilac Hill, a club ground and public park. Their next team-bonding mini-break, this time in the Queensland beach resort of Noosa, was just a humiliating two-day first-Test defeat away.
This was the master plan Brendon McCullum had initiated after his appointment as Test coach in 2022. “You’ve got to make it enjoyable, not just on the field but off the field, too,” he said during his first winter in charge, after he curtailed a warm-up fixture in New Zealand to take his squad to watch one of his racehorses in action.
“We want guys to know that, when they board a plane to head overseas, they’re going to have a great time. The results will hopefully follow. I always felt when I was playing that everything was based around the cricket and sometimes you forgot to enjoy yourself. We’ll see how it works out but it’s worth a crack.”
We have now seen how it worked out, and the only thing that cracked was the patience of McCullum’s employers. Having stripped him of his responsibility for coaching the red-ball side in July, on Monday Richard Thompson, the chair of the England and Wales Cricket Board, admitted the approach of eschewing warmups and embracing drinking sessions was a mistake. “There is a lot that was learned,” he said. “The reality is in those decisions, mistakes were made and we’ve corrected that now.”
The correction was revealed when McCullum said late last month, at the end of England’s summer, that he was now “trying to include a number of warm-up games” in their schedule to make up for the fact that “a lot of these guys just haven’t played a lot of white-ball cricket”. As a result, England will preface their one-day international series in Australia next month with a game against a Western Australia XI at the Waca, the first time in six years they have scheduled a warm-up match before a white-ball series.
The obvious irony is that the green shoots of a new, more serious approach to big-series preparation will sprout in the very city where the previous method withered. The Waca is the venue many thought England should have used to ready themselves for the Ashes, just over the river from the Optus Stadium –, where, as in last winter’s Test series, the first competitive game will be played.
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The pitches at both venues are overseen by the same curator, Isaac McDonald, whose ambition to nail “the characteristics of pace and bounce” made the decision to warm up on the low, slow surface of Lilac Hill most puzzling.
If the dial has shifted even for the teams still coached by McCullum, for the Test side the change is starker still – albeit only because of decisions made while he was still in charge, before he was replaced by his friend and compatriot Stephen Fleming. The red-ball team will play at least vaguely competitive warm-up games before all three foreign assignments this winter. A Cricket South Africa Invitation XI is lined up as opposition in Durban in December and the traditional fixture against a Prime Minister’s XI moves from Canberra to Melbourne’s Junction Oval, and is being played with a pink ball, in the buildup to the 150th anniversary Test at the MCG in March.
The two-match Test series in Bangladesh in February and March, itself preparation for the more high-profile assignment that follows in Melbourne, will have its own preparatory fixture. It means in the space of a year England have gone from playing no significant warm-ups at all to scheduling a warm-up game at the end of a warm-up series preceded by a warm-up game. There has been a change of coach and a change of approach, but those are the easy parts. The real test is for results to change with them.