England greats call for Brendon McCullum and Rob Key sacking before Ashes 2027

Former England captains and the nation’s leading cricket journalists are concerned that Ben Stokes has left their men’s Test team in a deep hole a year out from a home Ashes series.

Stokes’ retirement was announced as the 35-year-old was bowling shortly before tea on the fourth day of the third Test against New Zealand, which England went on to lose by 160 runs at Trent Bridge.

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That defeat handed New Zealand their first victory on English soil in a three-Test series this century with the combination of another poor result and Stokes’ departure leading to alarm bells ringing out in the Old Dart.

England’s Bazballers have won just two of their last eight Tests and those victories at the MCG and Lord’s where dicey pitches turned the Boxing Day Test and the series opener against New Zealand into a lottery.

Despite his diminishing returns with the bat, Stokes averaged 17.21 since the start of the Ashes last Australian summer, and the nightclub incident that resulted in him and Gus Atkinson missing the second Test at The Oval, the captain was not the person most English cricket fans wanted gone.

So, now the calls for the heads of coach Brendon McCullum and managing director Rob Key to be placed on pikes are growing louder.

“There must be change after what we’ve seen here in terms of a cricketing sense now over a period of time,” former England captain Michael Vaughan said on the BBC.

“I’ll be absolutely staggered if this leadership group is still together (after the New Zealand series).”

The 2005 Ashes winning skipper then went harder in his column for The Telegraph.

“I take no pleasure in doing this. I don’t like calling for heads. At the end of the Ashes I tried very hard not to. But I can’t cope with watching English cricket be so wasteful any more,” he wrote.

“As a former captain I cannot stand by and watch us play like this against a New Zealand team who are down to their bare bones after injury and the retirement of Kane Williamson. This was a week of opportunity, and what they were always going to be judged on.

“There is so much skill and talent in the England changing room but it is not being harnessed at all. If all we have is to just keep going harder, and it’s been exposed again, on the back of chaos off the field, which has been happening too regularly, then it is time for change.”

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England were set 373 for victory by the Kiwis at Trent Bridge.

On the fourth evening, Stokes’ side effectively threw the game away as they went full Bazball mode to reach the close at 4/103 in just 15 overs.

Stokes promoted himself to open the batting.

He charged his first ball.

He tried to reverse ramp his second.

He got two sixes away – one straight back over the bowler’s head and another by sweeping a seamer over square leg – before falling for 30 off 20 balls.

It was complete madness or as journalist Cameron Ponsonby wrote in The Independent it “was fantastical, and at times farcical”.

“In the moments when you let your inner cynic win, Stokes’ main-character mantra can grate. The ninth over of a spell begins in 30 degree heat and you realise that ah, yes, Ben’s putting on his show again. Everyone look at Ben,” Ponsonby added.

“The man who prides himself on going to the well, even if a tap’s right there.”

Or perhaps it was best described by Cricinfo’s Vithushan Ehantharajah in saying Stokes “decided to burn his church to the ground”.

“The man who kept Ashes series alive, brought World Cups back from the brink and, four years ago, resuscitated English Test cricket decided that his final act was to bring it all down in a blaze,” he added.

“It was utterly needless, entirely self-centred … and mind-meltingly stunning from a renegade allrounder who built his legacy out of astounding displays, but none quite like this.”

Former England batter Mark Butcher was certainly playing the cynic on the Wisden Cricket Weekly podcast at the end of the match.

“You can hold two thoughts at once,” the 71-Test left-hander said.

“You can be very sad that you will never get to see Ben Stokes play again. You can be very happy that you got the chance to see a player who could do the type of things that he could do to win matches single-handedly, to reverse inevitable tides in his favour.

“And you can be watching a Test match that is very important for England, and go, you’ve flushed it down the toilet.”

While former England captain Andrew Strauss was also feeling hurt by what he saw.

“I’m not convinced that the whole thing was orchestrated the right way yesterday — it seems like a huge distraction to a team that was battling to avoid a series defeat and the cricket in the last session very much had an ‘end of term’ feel to it,” the last England captain to win in Australia wrote on LinkedIn.

“Everyone has the right to bow out on their own terms, and no-one has earned that more than Ben, but announcing before or after the game seems like a more sensible approach. When you are in the middle of a match, the only thing that matters is the performance of the team.”

But it was not Stokes’ knock that drew the most outrage.

That came via Harry Brook, Stokes’ vice-captain who endorsed to be his successor.

Brook slogged 21 off 9 balls before being caught at fine leg.

Vaughan was livid on commentary at the time for the BBC saying: “that is a pathetic Test match innings. Absolutely pathetic.”

While Sky Sports picked up the New Zealanders mocking Brook’s bizarre knock on the stump mic and asking: “what are they doing?”

If Brook, who is England’s white-ball skipper, is to be made captain despite his indiscretion with a nightclub bouncer the night before an ODI in Wellington last year and the fact Joe Root stepped in for Stokes at The Oval earlier this series, Vaughan believes there must be another change in the dressing room.

“Brook just cannot do that job if McCullum is still in charge. It is yin and yin. You cannot have that,” Vaughan added in his column.

“I am more than happy for Brook to do the job with someone else, but not McCullum. It would be chaos.”

McCullum survived the axe despite England’s 4-1 Ashes series loss debacle.

They squandered a big lead to lose inside two days in Perth before their bowlers wilted in the heat in Brisbane, Adelaide and Sydney, while their batters also tossed away their wickets at crucial moments.

The size of their defeats have also been considerable.

Eight wickets in Perth and Brisbane, 83 runs in Adelaide and five wickets in Sydney.

While New Zealand handed them thrashings at The Oval (253 runs) and Trent Bridge (160).

When pondering McCullum’s recent record, The Guardian’s Ali Martin could not help but draw comparisons to an Australian coach who suffered a whirlwind tenure in Nottingham.

“After a season of four managers across the road at the City Ground, there is no question what (Nottingham Forest owner) Evangelos Marinakis would do with a management team producing the kind of results England’s supporters have endured of late. Seven defeats in nine is scarcely different to Ange Postecoglou’s short-lived run of six in eight,” Martin wrote.

“Whether English cricket’s two Richards, Gould and Thompson, similarly reach for the button that opens the trapdoor to the shark pool remains to be seen. Brendon McCullum, the head coach, said he felt backed to continue and his ­appetite remains strong. But it does feel like he and the team ­director, Rob Key, are teetering.”

Many believe the way England’s top order batted on the fourth evening was a message to the hierarchy.

“England needed to bat patiently – and long. Instead, after the captain’s retirement had been packaged by the ECB in video form for social media feasting, they indulged themselves with one last Bazball fling when they had four and a half sessions to at least try to play for a draw,” The Observer’s Paul Hayward wrote.

“The crowd loved it. And then they didn’t. It began to dawn that England were having some sort of wild send-off for the hero of the 2019 World Cup. While the match was still going on. To call it a mutiny might be too strong but unmistakably a middle-finger had been raised.”

But former England captain Nasser Hussain seemed less convinced that change will take place before the first Test against Pakistan at Headingley on August 19.

McCullum is contracted to lead the Test and white ball teams until the end of next year’s Ashes series.

Hussain seemed resigned to McCullum staying in charge for another 12 months.

“England have lost seven out of nine Test matches. You can’t hide behind that,” Nasser Hussain told Sky Sports Cricket.

“Brendon always comes across very positive and full of energy. I’d like a little bit more honesty at times.

“Like the last Test at The Oval, where he was asked about the plans – that one hour on the third day for the tail – and he said the plans were OK. They weren’t. They got the plans wrong.

“He was asked about the batting line-up [at Trent Bridge], and he said it’s all about, ‘when the ball was hard, that’s a good time to score’. Well, actually, when the ball was hard was the difficult time to bat.

“England needed someone to play like Daryl Mitchell and grind out a score, so that today when it was a bit easier – as Jamie Smith showed – you can go out and smash it.”

Those sort of calls for greater patience, maturity and game awareness with the bat were almost daily catch cries during the Ashes.

It was a stark contrast to the early years of Bazball when Stokes and McCullum’s team were hailed for the all out attack approach with the bat.

The situation they find themselves in now has proven that was a little more than a sugar hit.

There were impressive series wins at home against South Africa and New Zealand as well as a series whitewash on some of the flattest batting pitches ever seen in Pakistan.

They also drew and won two series in New Zealand.

But Stokes’ men failed to defeat either Australia or India at home, while being beaten 4-1 away to their fellow members of the big three.

Plus, they were dusted in Pakistan on turning surfaces last year.

They have not come close to making a World Test Championship final and sit seventh with four wins from 13 Tests in the current cycle.

“I feel a little bit disappointed and deflated,” Hussain added.

“For everything that English cricket has going for it, we are way down the World Test Championship table.

“The irony is, England have got a lot of New Zealanders in the backroom staff, and it’s actually New Zealand who are giving us the template on how you should prepare, play, behave and act as a Test nation.

“We’ve got to learn from what we’ve just seen in the last three Tests on the field. If you want to get better, sometimes look at the opposition and what they’re doing well and learn from them.”

While the focus appears to mainly be on the backroom staff, England are likely to have a very different looking team in the first Test against Australia at Edgbaston next June.

Aside from the captaincy debate, Stokes’ departure leaves “a huge vacuum in the England team that will be impossible to fill”, according to Strauss.

Many in England are quick to point to Australia’s ageing team, but barring injury, Pat Cummins’ side is set to be far more settled coming into the Ashes.

The players Stokes and McCullum have backed to fill the void left by recently retired players have failed to nail down there spots.

Ollie Pope and Zak Crawley were dumped from the top order after the tour of Australia.

While their bowling attack is a revolving door and Stokes, who has battled injury issues, has been their most reliable bowler in the past year – taking 42 wickets at 24.07 in that time.

Ollie Robinson, who was recalled and won man of the match honours at Lord’s but was unsighted for the remainder of the New Zealand series, and Jofra Archer will now take on the role of the senior statesman of the attack despite both struggling with fitness at times.

“More broadly, Stokes’ departure means England have lost another world-class player, continuing a three-year procession through the exit door,” the BBC’s Stephan Shemilt wrote.

“Anderson, Stuart Broad, Chris Woakes and Moeen Ali have all retired. Jonny Bairstow and Mark Wood will probably never play Test cricket again. Joe Root is the only active England Test player to know what it is like to win an Ashes series, the sole survivor of the school of former coach Andy Flower.”

As Australian fans know all too well as the country became all-rounder obsessed off the back of Andrew Flintoff’s 2005 Ashes campaign, the absence of a world-class all-rounder leaves a gaping hole in a team.

The way to counter it is with a world-class spinner who can hold up an end.

England bridged the four-year gap between Flintoff’s retirement and Stokes’ debut with Graeme Swann.

They do not have the same luxury this time around.

“Unless Sam Curran makes a Test comeback, it may be that ­England have to look to a spin-bowling all‑rounder for balance, with ­players such as Rehan Ahmed, Liam ­Patterson‑White and James Coles all options. Shoaib Bashir, a promising cricketer, but blooded optimistically, will now struggle to play without Stokes,” The Guardian’s Ali Martin added.

“Although what England have lost goes beyond just balance. Suddenly a team that Stokes called out for being a bit meek in Australia has lost its only aggressor; the one player who gave them snarl in the field and meant opposition sides could never relax while he was still at the crease.”

Stokes’ absence is a cricketer will be felt more with time.

He has never been a big numbers player, although his numbers sit behind Jacques Kallis and Sir Garfield Sobers in terms of Test all-rounders.

Instead, he has been a moments player.

A man for the big occasion.

Australians still have nightmares about Headingley in 2019.

New Zealanders of the World Cup final at Lord’s roughly a month earlier.

A player who is rough around the edges and came up clutch when his nation needed him is why England fans revere Stokes along with Flintoff and Sir Ian Botham.

As The Guardian’s Vic Marks pointed out Stokes is “a cricketer capable of grabbing the headlines during a football World Cup”.

Many think this may not be the end.

In post-match interviews he shut down speculation of an Ashes comeback.

But many in England are holding out hope that the then 36-year-old will be locking horns with the Australians yet again.

“Everyone can accept Stokes is finished as a captain but, after a rest, some time away from this set-up, there is no reason why he cannot reverse his retirement decision. He did it with white-ball cricket a few years ago to play one more 50-over World Cup,” The Telegraph’s chief cricket correspondent Nick Hoult wrote at Trent Bridge.

“His relationship with McCullum on a professional level may well be dead, but it matters less as a player with no decision-making responsibility.

“Surely he will be itching to get going again when Australia are back.

“I will be in a hospitality box watching it somewhere,” he said. Let’s hope not.”