SYDNEY — The Ashes series is thankfully over and now the inquest can begin. England & Wales Cricket Board chief executive Richard Gould has already begun a review.
But if he needs any pointers about where coach Brendon McCullum and managing director Rob Key went wrong, The i Paper can give him a few pointers.
Poor planning and organisation
There was just one three-day warm-up match before the series at a club ground in Perth as opposed to the Waca, where conditions were equivalent to what England would find at Optus Stadium. The reason England were rebuffed – there was a Sheffield Shield game scheduled at the same time – didn’t wash.
If John Carr, the ECB’s former head of operations who left in 2023, had still been on board it’s likely Cricket Australia (CA) would have ceded to England’s demands. After all, India got eight days at the WACA in 2024 before their series opener in Perth.
Instead, Key left the job of sorting out the warm-up venue to Stuart Hooper, who was the ECB’s head of operations at the time. He failed, with Key ultimately signing off on Lilac Hill. CA were unhelpful, possibly because India won that first Test in Perth in 2024.
It left England at a suburban ground with inadequate facilities to warm-up for a series that would define this regime’s legacy.
The players were unhappy with the ground, with Mark Wood so psyched out by the long, spongy grass that made running more taxing he requested a scan after fearing a hamstring injury.
Conditions at Lilac Hill were amateurish and left Mark Wood nursing an injury (Photo: Getty)The pitch was a low, slow pudding, making the whole endeavour about the worst prep the team could have asked for.
As for why there was no pink-ball warm-up ahead of the second Test in Brisbane, we can cite more Cricket Australia unhelpfulness – insisting England play a Prime Minister’s XI in Canberra rather than setting up a floodlight game in sub-tropical Queensland at a venue such as Allan Border Field in Brisbane.
Again, ECB ineptitude can be cited, while the laissez faire attitude of McCullum cannot be overlooked either. After all, he insisted on only one tour match across nine weeks.
Looseness in team culture – illustrated by Noosa ‘stag do’
Concerns of a drinking culture in the team were rebuffed by Key following the team’s break to the Queensland holiday resort of Noosa when 2-0 down after as many Tests. Footage of a seemingly drunk Ben Duckett was posted on social media hours later.
News of Harry Brook’s altercation with a bouncer the night before an ODI in Wellington, just before the tour of Australia, surfaced after the Ashes series. Brook, England’s white-ball captain and deputy to Ben Stokes in the Test team, was fined £30,000 and given a final warning as to his future conduct. Reports of other instances of England players being drunk on the Ashes tour were received by The i Paper.
Stubborness in ignoring technical detail
The stripped back coaching team came back to haunt McCullum. With no specialist fielding coach, England dropped 19 catches in the series costing more than 500 runs.
There’s also no full-time bowling coach, with David Saker and Tim Southee sharing that role for the tour.
Wicketkeeper Jamie Smith struggled. Guess what? England don’t have a wicketkeeping coach.
Even Marcus Trescothick, a batting coach, admitted after the second Test in Brisbane, he’d not discussed the danger of driving on the up in Australian conditions. Really?
Poor selection
Pope has been in woeful form on this Ashes tour (Photo: Reuters)England kept faith with Ollie Pope last summer when anybody who’d watched Jacob Bethell closely in New Zealand the previous winter knew he was the No 3 who could take the team to another level.
Pope, who averaged 11.16 in Australia in the 2021-22 Ashes, was dropped after three Tests. Bethell scored more runs in one day in Sydney (142) than Pope managed in the whole series (125).
Josh Tongue, with 18 wickets at 20 after he was given his chance for the third Test, was also overlooked initially. Shoaib Bashir, groomed for two years to be the spinner on this tour, didn’t play a Test.
Underestimating the challenge of Australia
After the Ashes had been lost in just 11 days of cricket once England went 3-0 down in Adelaide, Key said the team had been operating at 20 per cent of their capacity – an astounding admission.
In the first week of the tour, captain Ben Stokes had moaned that former players criticising the team’s preparation were “has-beens”.
It came back to bite the players when they were evidently not mentally ready for the challenge.
McCullum admitted after Adelaide: “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.”
Mental skills coach Gilbert Enoka, a friend of McCullum, came out for the build-up to the series but left after the first Test. He evidently didn’t do a very good job.
Failing to handle intensity of an Ashes tour
England were ambushed by the tour’s intensity. It started with a slew of negative headlines in the West Australian newspaper. But it was relentless.
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They were followed by news crews at every airport, with the general sense of irritation embodied by a confrontation between a TV cameraman and team security man Colin Rhooms at Brisbane airport after the second Test.
Some players, including Stokes, were pictured riding scooters without helmets in Brisbane. It led to England’s captain being asked to apologise to the people of Queensland by a political reporter from Brisbane’s Courier-Mail ahead of that Test.
The players were then followed around Noosa by news crews and shock jocks during their mid-series break. Before the final Test in Sydney, Stokes admitted the scrutiny and noise on social media, in particular, was impossible to ignore, saying: “It’s just impossible not to see it. The only way to do it is just throw your phone in the river.”
Internal tensions as tour unravelled
Stokes indicated as much with his post-Brisbane comments that Australia was no place for “weak men”.
Those internal tensions came to the fore as the tourists unravelled in Adelaide when Stokes was picked up telling Jofra Archer to “shut the f*** up” after the fast bowler had taken a wicket in the third Test.
By this stage, McCullum and Stokes’ public messaging also seemed at odds.
Muddled messaging and moving away from Bazball
The go-slow as Stokes and Will Jacks batted together in Brisbane signalled a shift away from Bazball’s core principles. England became defensive as the Ashes slipped away.
Previously the set-up had worked on the basis of individual, informal chats rather than team meetings. But before Adelaide, Stokes called a team meeting to clear the air. This came after McCullum had lost the backing of fans when saying the team were “overprepared” after Brisbane.
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