For too long management have overpromoted players on potential, tolerated their lack of cricket and prepared casually. McCullum, Key and Stokes can’t all survive fallout

The backlash has scarcely begun but it is coming hard. One senior county figure, who was watching in Adelaide, said waspishly: “Well, I’ll say one thing for them. They have improved their golf handicaps. And they have done it at our expense.”

Fail to prepare, prepare to fail

McCullum’s relaxed style originally appeared to be a virtue as he took over a team that had lost their joy in the game, but what became clear with time was how pervasive this philosophy would be.

There was an impression that England had been preparing for this Ashes tour for three years but it turned out that the plans were, in many respects, always casual and flexible. McCullum enjoys horse racing and loves a punt, and he has taken those gambling instincts into the way he runs his team.

Quite what preparations they could have chosen before the first Test is a matter of debate but it seems they were offered a game against a state side in Melbourne or Adelaide. The problem was that this would have involved a rush in arriving from the white-ball tour of New Zealand, plus England wanted to get on to the Perth time zone — so they declined. They also thought the white-ball games in New Zealand would be of value, but for various reasons — not all of them foreseeable — they were not.

Given the inexperienced nature of their squad, England should definitely have looked to play against Australian opposition rather than the internal warm-up they opted for against the Lions. McCullum and Rob Key, the managing director of England men’s cricket, got this wrong and may pay a heavy price. Richard Gould, the ECB chief executive, has a military background and it would be odd if he was soft on botched preparation.

Lack of mental toughness

Ben Stokes has tacitly admitted that some of his players found the hostility they encountered in the first and second Tests a shock, hence his calls for more fight and talk of there being no room for weak men. All too late when you are 2-0 down.

Stokes and McCullum should have twigged that their policy of backing youth — and often youth with little experience of regular county cricket, let alone exposure to Australian aggression — was in danger of leading them to select personalities who were insufficiently game-hardened. Gus Atkinson, Shoaib Bashir, Jamie Smith and Jacob Bethell may all fall into this category.

McCullum himself had only ever toured Australia with his native New Zealand, a completely different proposition to England coming here with the Ashes on the line.

This lack of strategic or tactical awareness was evident when England toured India in early 2024 and lost 4-1. They seemed unaware that big runs in the first innings was the way to forge victories there — unlike in England, where pitches stay true for longer — hence Ben Duckett’s absurd comment in Rajkot that India could “have as many as they want, and we will go and get them”. Similarly, the way to win in Australia is to first get comfortable with the constant aggro.

Unserious selection and staffing blunders

Surely only a management group that have completely underestimated the task at hand would back a spinner in Bashir who does not even hold a county contract and has not bowled in a competitive match for months, a wicketkeeper who does not keep regularly for his county in Smith, and a spare batsman in Bethell who is only 22 and has never scored a first-class century.

Meanwhile, all of the Australians bar Pat Cummins prepared for this series by playing at least one Sheffield Shield match, and in most cases two or three. For too long McCullum has allowed a culture to exist where not playing cricket seemed wholly acceptable. That cannot be right.

Few would dispute that England have played well below their potential here and the head coach is going to have to outline why. If the explanation is a shortage of cricket, he has a problem.

He and Key (who leads on selection) have also been reluctant to drop their favoured players even when their returns have been thin. Alternatives have been given very little chance to show what they can do — Bethell got his chance in New Zealand only in an emergency — and this loyalty may well have done much to create a cosseted atmosphere that falls apart when they are outplayed, as they have been here.

No one knows if there are batsmen out there who could score more runs, or spinners with a resilience Bashir may lack, because so few players have been tried.

The plan to come to Australia with a hostile pace attack was perhaps fair enough but there is still no substitute for repeatedly hitting a good line and length, as the Australians have done. England’s bowlers — with one or two notable exceptions — have been unable to do that. Mark Wood was a gamble that did not pay off, as was fairly clear would be the case several months ago.

Yes, James Anderson was forcibly retired but Chris Woakes was never going to feature here and was allowed to stay so long that it denied others much-needed exposure.

One area in which McCullum acted ruthlessly was in paring down his backroom staff. He wanted players to think for themselves but this move also denied them the kind of training they needed from fielding coaches who are no longer around. Sure enough, dropped catches have been a part of what has gone wrong.

Loss of faith in Bazball

The management should also have known that trying to play their high-octane game of aggression was at risk of unravelling on Australia’s bouncy pitches. Australia knew how England were going to play and — as Scott Boland effectively said — all their bowlers had to do was stick the ball outside off stump and let the batsmen hang themselves. The tourists had no plan B.

Even before the team got to Australia, there were signs of some players — including Joe Root and even Stokes himself — making their own adjustments. The way England’s run chase petered out against India at the Oval in the final Test of the summer suggested a team that were losing their nerve, and in the course of the past month we have seen their nerves break completely.

Watching this England team now, no one would think they were so original that it was necessary to invent a name to describe them. Stokes’s half-century on Friday was England’s slowest of the “Bazball” era.

The messy fallout

The damage could be widespread. The counties have been asked to produce players in England’s mould — Stokes said in 2022 that the new way England played “sent a message to anyone who wants to play Test cricket for England” and that Sir Alastair Cook would not get in his side — but where do things stand now? If Bazball no longer works, and is no longer being followed by the central actors, then what is the point? How are people supposed to play?

Key’s biggest mistake was perhaps putting McCullum in charge of the white-ball sides as well as the Test team. White-ball cricket needs detail but McCullum is a broad-brush man, not a details one. Within days of the Ashes ending, McCullum needs to throw himself into a white-ball tour to Sri Lanka and a T20 World Cup. If McCullum is sacked, is he sacked from everything or just red-ball cricket?

Key, McCullum and Stokes got their jobs on the back of demands for improvement after the disastrous tour to Australia four years ago. But this one has arguably been worse, and certainly more careless. They can’t all survive.