Well, don’t say it out loud.
“Leading into this Test match,” Brendon McCullum said after the conclusion of a brutal second Ashes Test for England, falling 2-0 behind Australia. “I actually think we overprepared, to be honest.”
A bookmark moment for Ashes obituaries everywhere. The leader and co-founder of Bazball, alongside Ben Stokes, was hard on himself and the team, making light of a galling defeat that all but ends England’s hopes Down Under, falling to an eight-wicket loss. People had waited so long for this. The referendum on a new style of play, contested in a box-office series between cricket’s two oldest enemies. And after six days on the pitch – it’s all but done.
People respond to setbacks differently. The point of this England team is to wear international cricket lightly while understanding its gravitas. A nigh-on impossible tightrope to navigate, but an admirable one, nonetheless. “Make sure the top two inches are right,” has become the group’s newest catchphrase. It makes sense. Cricket is a mentally gruelling game.
But leadership lives in diplomacy as well. The ability to read a room. This is the leader of a team who, rightly or wrongly, has a reputation of the 11 men who like a beer and a round of golf with a side of cricket. A team that has already received criticism for only playing one warm-up fixture ahead of the tour and for skipping a two-day game in Canberra. Don’t say, after scheduling two extra days of training ahead of this Test, that you had actually overprepared. People will laugh at you. The way this tour is going, jobs are on the line, and things are hitting the fan, so keep people onside.
McCullum and Stokes are bound at the hip. They stay on each other’s message, not through media training, but a genuine shared belief of how the game could be played, if only the rest of us could understand. Tonight, their message parted ways.
“There is a saying here that Australia is not for weak men,” said an emotional and at times bereft Ben Stokes when asked how England would respond. “A dressing room that I am captain of is not a place for weak men either.
“I said last night, we are where we are…I just wanted us to fight, just show some fight and we’ll see where we are.
“Nothing’s guaranteed in life, and nothing’s guaranteed in sport, but as long as you walk out there and think in your head. ‘I’m going to fight all the way to the end here,’ that’s all you can focus on.
“What you saw from Will Jacks and me was from me saying, anyone who’s got responsibility left in this game just show fight.”
And McCullum?
“Ehhh, I think we’ll probably have a beer tonight.”
One man is wearing this defeat lighter than the other.
This team has never done things they don’t believe in to appease outside noise. But with the captain delivering several raw media interactions, the difference in tone was staggering.
Stokes himself was asked about McCullum’s comments after he spoke to the written press following a long delay, where he went to the changing room to talk to his team. Normally, captains are keen to knock off all media duties as quickly as possible before returning to the rooms. Here, he spoke to TV and radio, then saw the need to return to his shellshocked England team and speak, before completing his final media duties.
“There’s a lot of training that you see where you’re just doing it for the sake of doing it,” he said when asked about McCullum’s comments. “You’re doing it to look right, to be doing the right things, whereas actually you’re not achieving anything out of it.
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“There’s a saying that ‘are you going to train to train, or are you going to train to dominate’. I like to train to dominate, and so does this team.”
Since the pair took over, McCullum has always been the one to deliver the good and bad news to individuals. Whether they have been selected or whether they have been dropped. It is not new that the pair have taken on different parental roles in the group, but it is where mum and dad have sounded so different.
The fear you can see emanating from Stokes is that his men aren’t up for the fight. To oversimplify Bazball, the message to the team is ‘play well’. Put pressure on at times to put pressure on, and absorb pressure when it is time to absorb pressure. On the biggest stage, his men have been faltering.
“I think a lot of it comes down to not being able to stand up to the pressure of this game when the game is on the line,” he said. “In small passages, we have been able to bring the game back into some kind of control and then let it slip away.”
The team now go on a mid-series break to nearby Noosa, an idyllic beach town that attracts the rich and famous of Australia. The optics, again, will be poor when, perhaps, Ben Duckett and Brydon Carse are pictured on a boogie board. But they have to go somewhere, and if this team is in need of anything at the moment, it is to pick themselves back up after a harrowing few days. It is something Stokes is all too aware of.
“It’d be completely understandable if there were some guys who were feeling the pressure,” he said.
“I’m not someone who is afraid to go and check on everyone if I feel like I need to. We need everyone to be pretty switched on and if there are any worries, if there are any doubts to what we have to come up in the next three or four weeks, I need to sort that out and help the guys get through that.
“Sometimes I feel like if you just presume that someone’s OK, it’s pretty dangerous, I guess. You can be putting on a front to avoid those tough, difficult conversations.”
On a day where Stokes spoke to let it all out, he told an anecdote following the Perth defeat where Joe Root came up to him after scores of 0 and 8 and apologised for his role in the defeat and that he’d get him a big hundred in Brisbane. Stokes told him to never apologise, but Root scored the hundred anyway.
The Ashes is the biggest series of these players’ lives. And when it’s all on the line, it’s important to get the tone right.
