On the third evening of the third Test at Adelaide, a small ironic cheer went up among Australian journalists when it emerged that Jeetan Patel, England’s spin-bowling coach, would be speaking at the close-of-play press conference.
It is not uncommon for members of the backroom staff to address the media during a Test match. But they tend to do so only on days when no player has done well enough to justify appearing in front of the cameras and dictaphones – and this was the third day in succession that England had sent forth one of their assistant coaches, following David Saker (fast bowling) on the first evening and Marcus Trescothick (batting) on the second.
The trend ended on the fourth day, when opening batsman Zak Crawley took his turn, but by then England’s backroom staff had been exposed to the light, answering some questions about the team’s disappointing performance and, unintentionally, inviting others about their own roles.
And as ECB bosses rake over these Ashes – the ninth out of 10 England have lost in Australia since Mike Gatting’s team triumphed in 1986-87 – the make-up of the dressing-room will figure high on the agenda.
Chief among the concerns is that head coach Brendon McCullum has surrounded himself with an ever-smaller coterie of ‘yes men’, depriving the players not simply of technical expertise in specific areas of the game, but of critical voices willing to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies of Bazball.
Trescothick had already raised eyebrows after speaking on the third evening of the second Test at Brisbane, where he said England had not discussed the perils of driving on the up in Australian conditions after the defeat in Perth.
England coach David Saker (left) was only drafted in by Brendon McCullum to work with the quick bowlers in October
England’s spin coach Jeetan Patel raised eyebrows with his remarks about the Ashes which went against what McCullum had previously said
For one thing, this said something about McCullum’s disdain for analysis. In the days before Matthew Mott was sacked as white-ball coach after the 2024 T20 World Cup in the Caribbean, the Test players in the limited-overs squad astonished their white-ball-specialist colleagues by telling them they never bothered with team meetings.
Now, Trescothick appeared to underline the point, leaving observers to wonder what exactly his role was if not to identify technical flaws in the most important series of the McCullum era.
Saker, the popular 59-year-old Australian who worked well with Andy Flower’s team during the successful 2010-11 Ashes tour, then revealed in Adelaide that his modus operandi had never strayed from the basic principle of hitting the top of off stump.
Fair enough – except that England repeatedly departed from the principle while going 3–0 down, especially on the fateful second afternoon at Perth, and at the start of the second day of the pink-ball Test at Brisbane. Then, on the second morning at Adelaide, Ben Stokes and Jofra Archer engaged in a tense exchange after England bowled the wrong lengths to Mitchell Starc, allowing Australia’s No 9 to score his second successive half-century.
Was Saker being ignored? Or were the bowlers simply not good enough to implement his time-honoured strategy? Either way, something wasn’t right.
Patel, an eternal optimist whose long relationship with McCullum extends to their playing days with New Zealand, was then accused of gaslighting supporters after he claimed that the notion of the Ashes being England’s main focus was ‘everyone else’s story’, but not the dressing-room’s. As recently as September, however, McCullum himself had branded the tour as ‘the biggest series of all our lives’.
Patel ended the press conference by telling journalists: ‘Enjoy your evening. Have a pint, because I will be.’ Coming so soon after the heavily scrutinised four-day trip to Noosa, with whispers already emerging about the quantity of beer consumed, the comment smacked of a looseness that McCullum’s entourage has never been able to shake off.
It is not just the public pronouncements. Saker took on the key role of working with England’s battery of quicks – a central pillar in their attempts to regain the urn – as late as October, initially working with New Zealander Tim Southee, before Southee left the tour after the first Test to compete in the ILT20 in the Gulf. It was not a move designed to foster continuity.
England captain Ben Stokes with Saker whose mantra seems to be ‘hit the top of off stump’
There are fears McCullum has surrounded himself with ‘yes men’
Then there’s the catching, which has arguably cost England as dearly as loose bowling and shoddy batting. Yet Carl Hopkinson was dispensed with as fielding coach more than a year ago, and Paul Collingwood has not worked with England since May as he attends to a personal matter.
And if England’s catch success rate in this series of 81 per cent looks close on paper to Australia’s 86 per cent, then many of Australia’s supposed drops were half-chances at best. All the clangers have been put down by England. At Adelaide, Harry Brook dropped Usman Khawaja on five and Travis Head on 99, two errors which ended up costing 148 runs. England lost the game by 82. Their catalogue of errors includes Jamie Smith’s howler to reprieve Head on three at Brisbane, where Australia were replying to England’s serviceable 334, yet there is no specialist wicketkeeping coach here either.
An approach that once conveyed the vibe of a band of brothers, pared to the bone to alleviate the ‘outside noise’ England so dislike, has on this trip left the tourists undermanned and outgunned. Even those who are here seem to have departed from the traditional understanding of what a coach actually does.
The looseness has not gone unnoticed in the upper echelons of the ECB. And if they do end up sticking with McCullum, whatever the result of the fifth Test in Sydney, some of his assistants may be less fortunate.
