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England have not even played the Boxing Day Test yet, but the fallout from yet another Ashes defeat in Australia has already been significant.
Fans want answers as to why a team that was widely regarded as having a chance of becoming only the second side since 1987 to return from Down Under with the urn has been roundly thrashed inside 11 days. As is par for the course — golf pun intended — on these tours, people also want heads on a spike.
Since the 82-run defeat in Adelaide, captain Ben Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum have sought to explain where they think things have gone wrong, with both also stating their intention to carry on in their respective roles.
Now it was the turn of England’s managing director of men’s cricket, Rob Key, to offer his explanation.
During a 50-minute sit-down interview with written journalists, he outlined why the tourists failed so miserably. Well, 47 minutes actually, due to an excruciatingly hilarious three-minute interruption from the emergency fire alarm test system at Melbourne Cricket Ground. It was the longest Test of the Australian summer so far, etc etc. He explained how:
- The setup would investigate suggestions the four-day break in Noosa descended into a glorified stag do
- Players could have been dropped sooner in the build-up to the series
- Preparations were far from ideal and the squad has lacked sufficient support staff
- England have played dumb cricket at times.
Here, The Athletic breaks down his explanations for England’s comprehensive defeat.
Rob Key meets journalists at the Melbourne Cricket Ground (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
Some players could have been dropped sooner
England have placed a lot of faith in players they thought would be suited to the challenge of winning the Ashes in Australia, with Zak Crawley, Ben Duckett and Harry Brook identified some time ago as having the required skills and attitude to play the regime’s preferred style of aggressive cricket.
The top seven batting line-up has remained the same for all three Tests but while Key believes chopping and changing now during the series is less of an issue, he admitted the setup could have better identified whether certain players could cut it a while ago.
“You start looking at some of the decisions we’ve made and think: ‘Do you know what? Should we have made a change there much sooner?’,” he said. “It’s not right to speculate who those people are at the moment, but they’re the things you look at.”
It was not difficult to to whom he might be referring, with Ollie Pope desperately struggling for runs at No 3 — he has 125 increasingly jittery runs at 20.83 — while Shoaib Bashir probably should not have played so many times as England’s front-line spinner over the last few years if they were not going to pick him on a turning wicket at Adelaide.
Ollie Pope (right) talks to coach Brendon McCullum at a net session in Melbourne (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
Key added: “We’re so much better than how we’ve played. We had a team that hasn’t played anywhere near its potential.
“Did we give the players the best chance to come out here and succeed from the start? I don’t think we did. And that’s on us.”
Preparations were not ideal
McCullum has already conceded that England playing one three-day match at a tiny ground in Lilac Hill against an inexperienced England Lions side might not have been an ideal warm-up.
England had also played three white-ball one-day internationals (ODIs) in New Zealand before heading out to Australia — Key conceded they did not serve as ideal preparation, either.
“Did we give them the best chance to succeed in Perth?” he said. “I thought the bowlers bowled well, I thought we batted poorly.
“You’re trying to hedge your bets a little bit and go: ‘OK, 50-over cricket (in New Zealand) can be a good opportunity where you get competitive cricket, where batters in particular can start to find form if you’re Joe Root — people like that.
“That turned out to not go to plan. We ended up in tough early-season conditions out in New Zealand, where the batters actually probably did more harm than good — Ben Duckett, people like that.”
England’s opener scored two, one and eight in the three ODIs, and has managed 97 runs at 16.16 in the Ashes to date.
Ben Duckett struggled badly in New Zealand and that form pursued him to Australia (DJ Mills/AFP via Getty Images)
“Then you feel like you’re chasing it a little bit because one part of it’s gone,” continued Key. “Then you can’t flip your preparation and go: ‘Oh, by the way, now we need to play loads of games’.
“Probably about a year ago, we had a choice of whether we went to Adelaide and played against an Australian team there, or whether we just went to Perth and tried to control the preparation ourselves. They said to us: ‘Actually, if you go there, it’s not going to be the WACA or Optus. You’re going to end up at a club ground’.
“And I said: ‘No, it’s fine, we feel we can control that preparation better’.
“But the conditions at Lilac Hill didn’t replicate (the Test). I don’t think they would have done in Adelaide either. So I don’t necessarily believe that, had we just gone and played there, then we’d be now 3-0 up in the Ashes. I don’t think that’s the case.”
There aren’t enough support staff
England haven’t had a fielding coach since Paul Collingwood stepped back from the setup last summer. With a litany of costly dropped catches — Australia, by contrast, have been razor sharp in the field — it’s been perhaps an overlooked aspect of why they have been beaten so easily yet again.
As well as McCullum, they have three coaches supporting the team in Australia: fast-bowling coach David Saker, batting coach Marcus Trescothick and spin coach Jeetan Patel.
Key explained: “When we started, I looked at the huddle first day at Lord’s and there were 38 people in there. We wanted to strip all of that back and go: ‘Right we want the messaging to come from just a few people’.
“There’s probably a few spots where we’re weak in terms of our setup at the moment, where we’ve stripped it back too much, and there’s probably a few places we need to start bringing in some of that resource again.”
England coaches Marcus Trescothick and Brendon McCullum at nets in Perth (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
England have played dumb cricket
Some of England’s dismissals can look horrible. Jamie Smith, heaving straight up in the air when trying to hit his fifth consecutive boundary at Adelaide, springs to mind. Plenty of the dismissals in Perth and Brisbane fall into that category, too.
Key was asked if the players had been given too much autonomy in terms of how they play their cricket.
He said, “My view on it is that it’s pretty simple. This has always been Brendon’s thing. There’s a real difference between aggression and dumb, and sometimes we take dumb options.
“Looking to ramp bowlers very early on when you’re on 10 — stuff like that is dumb cricket. Looking to hit a wide half-volley hard is fine; that’s there to hit.
Jamie Smith, having hit four consecutive boundaries, skies a hoick to leg and is caught (Quinn Rooney/Getty Images)
“I don’t think we’ve ever hidden away from that, to be honest, but it’s a real fine balance between sort of taking away weapons from players and saying, ‘Don’t do this, don’t do that’.
“That’s where Brendon works bloody well at just speaking to players one-on-one and just trying to make sure that they make better decisions and not stupid decisions. It doesn’t always look like that, but it’s hard.”
While the interview was more of an inquest into England’s failings in Australia rather than a look at what might happen next, given the series is still ongoing, Key stated that he believes McCullum should stay on — and also that the team and the project need to evolve, no matter who is in charge.
Ultimately, the fate of McCullum, Key and Stokes lies in the hands of the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) hierarchy.
“Brendon’s always looking to evolve,” Key said. “When we’ve sat down and said: ‘How are we going to improve? How are we going to get better?’, at no stage has he ever said: ‘No, no, I’m only doing it this way’.
Rob Key speaks to Sky Sports’ Michael Atherton and Nasser Hussain, a columnist at The Athletic, at the MCG (Gareth Copley/Getty Images)
“There’s no question we have to evolve it again. If we get the opportunity, we’d have to make sure we get that right.
“(The decision on jobs) is out of my hands. The decision for the ECB will be whether or not they want to rip it up and start again, or whether they want to evolve and whether we’re the right people to do that.
“Brendon is an excellent coach. His record is very good. This is only the third series we’ve lost in four years (following on from away defeats in Pakistan and India).
“We’ve mucked up on the big occasions, whether that was the home Ashes series or last summer against India, where we should have won that series as well. The big ones have eluded us. There have been some brilliant moments along the way. I still feel like there’s plenty of life in this whole thing now, but we have to evolve.”
While the futures of several players and the backroom staff is up in the air, one thing Key insists can’t be tolerated is a drinking culture within the England team.
Players were pictured drinking during their four-night break in Noosa between the second and third Tests. Key had no issue with the venue on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast being used as a mid-tour getaway — he pointed out that Harry Brook is due to have just six days at home all winter — but insisted players drinking excessive amounts of alcohol would be deemed unacceptable.
He also pledged to investigate suggestions that the mid-tour trip, which had been planned for a year as a bonding session for the players, descended into a glorified ‘stag do’.
“If it goes into where they’re drinking lots and it’s a stag do, all of that type of stuff, that’s completely unacceptable,” he said of Noosa. “I’m not a drinker. A drinking culture doesn’t help anyone in any stretch whatsoever.
“Everything that I’ve heard is that they sat down, had lunch, had dinner, didn’t go out late, all of that, had the odd drink — I don’t mind that.
“If it goes past that, then that’s an issue as far as I’m concerned. If there are things where people are saying that our players went out and drank excessively, then we’ll be looking into that.
“From everything that I’ve heard, they actually were pretty well behaved. Very well behaved.
“I don’t mind players having a glass of wine over dinner. Anything more than that is ridiculous, really.”
