u/NiallH22

Not about that batting performance on Sunday night, we all know that was a shit show but the wider picture.

Still think McCullum will be gone? Key gone? Complete reset?

Been interesting listening to the 10000 podcasts about this week but I think most interesting came from the Telegraph podcast, who said the ECB had already made the decision to sack Rob Key but Stokes’ retirement has sent it all into a bit of chaos so when that announcement…or if that announcement still comes we don’t know.

For me, I still think complete reset is the right move, it may mean we have an interim head coach and DoC for the Pakistan series but I think you’ve got to take the rough to hopefully eventually get to the smooth and this isn’t about one series. It’s about the future of Englands test team in the long term, we cannot afford to tread water for another year because the ECB don’t want to pay out McCullum.

On the positive, the game and a half against India confirm to me that I’d be happy for Baz to carry on as white ball coach but I also worry that he’s become such a massive figure in it all that he’s overshadow whoever gets the red ball job.

Overall, it’s just a fucking mess isn’t it, and there needs to be consequences beyond just Key and McCullum, the whole top level of the ECB needs to be held accountable…but who holds them to account? There’s no cricketing expertise on the board barring Ebony Rainford-Brent and it would be unfair to put this all on her to make a difference…I don’t actually know how the mechanisms at the top of the ECB work, do the government have to step in?

I start by saying that I am 99% sure Harry Brook is going to be the next test captain and I’ll also throw in that I’m fine with that…assuming Baz gets the boot.

Also because if Baz, and presumably Key both get the boot then English cricket again finds itself at a cross roads and asking how to proceed, I’ve said already this week that I think for the summer the ECB will buy themselves some time and we’ll have a lot of interim-ing going on (Flintoff as interim coach, North as interim DoC, possibly Root as interim captain to, to give Harry and the new set up a clean start come the winter.)

My person opinion is that if Brook is to become test captain, then he should be stepped away from the white ball job, in an ideal world, I’d go one coach across formats and split the captaincy and give the white ball captaincy to someone not in the test squad at the moment. Whether that means a Phil Salt or Sam Curran, or whether it means Jacob Bethell stepping away from the test side for a bit.

Either way I think you need someone who’s sole focus is white ball cricket, that’s part of what made Eoin Morgan’s side successful, Morgan wasn’t distracted by test cricket so he could focus and really drive the white ball side without the coach always needing to be by his side…you’d obviously need someone strong enough as captain to be able to do that but the theory is solid.

As we don’t live in an ideal world, I’d split both…I hate splitting it completely, I think it always ends with one side feeling left out or like they’re being left short but with schedules the way they are, it’s the second best option I think, you’ve got to allow the test captain to focus on test captaining and the white ball captain to focus on white ball captaining.

I think something we’ve lost a bit under McCullum is that it’s the captain that runs the side, the captain that drives the side, makes the decisions, sets the tone, sets the standards, the play style…in the last year or two it feels like McCullum has become a much bigger feature than any coach I’ve known before, he’s almost become more of a football manager style figure and I’m not a fan of that.

So let’s get back to the more traditional approach, pick a strong coach, two strong captains or even captains with the potential to learn quickly in the job and let them build something, it might not be perfect at first but instead of jumping straight on them lets acknowledge that right now English cricket is lacking in leaders and captaincy options and therefore it’s going to take a bit of time to build. We really can’t afford to get it wrong again. (Also if we could get a coach/captain who actually wants to win the test championship and will acknowledge over rates, that’d be great too)

Over the last few days…weeks…months, a lot of anger had been directed at individuals like McCullum or Key or Stokes and whilst most of that is justified, I think it misses the wider picture, and that is that the ECB just don’t care about you.

There’s many examples I could use for this, it could be that they cut our test summer from 7 tests to 6 despite us being the one country that sells our test matches no matter the opponent, it could be about the hundred and it’s detriment to the 50 over game or it’s squeezing of the county season, it could be that they just don’t care about the world test championship because we host the final so no matter what, they get there money…

I’m actually instead going to use Wednesdays T20 against India as my example.

Anyone with half a brain would’ve have foreseen when the football World Cup fixtures came out that there was a very good chance England would be playing their first knockout game at 5 o clock on Wednesday night, the ECB should have seen this and pushed the start time of the t20 back to 7, put big screens up around the concourse and made it an event for ticket holders, who would’ve come early, watched the football, spent money on beer and food and then had the cricket afterwards. They also have a rights deal with channel 5 to show two t20s a summer, so put this on there and advertise it during the football, maximise the audience at home.

But what do they do instead? They moved the start time forward by an hour to 5:30 with only a couple of weeks notice, not only making it harder for ticket holders heading down after work but also to pander to the Indian audience and scrounge a bit more money out of the Indian broadcast rights.

The ECB don’t care about you, they care only about how much money they can get from India, after we’d lost the Ashes down under and everyone’s focus was on how we turn the test side around for the 2027 Ashes, all they cared about was that India aren’t touring in 2027 so they might lose some money.

The ECB do not care about you. The ECB is currently not fit for purpose and that is where our anger should be directed.

For those out of the loop, Sky are currently in the process of buying ITV for a reported…fuck ton of money. I wonder, is this now the chance to get more cricket on FTA tv?

Particularly test match cricket, maybe one game a summer on ITV? It’ll be pretty much a net gain for them, more eyes on it, more advertising cash and a simulcast will cost them nothing, more advertising for their sports channels…

I also wonder if it brings ITV to forefront when it comes to the next round of selling the rights to The Hundred, Sky and the ECB are so intertwined at this point that it would make complete sense of Sky to snap up the FTA games too and stick them on ITV, again, it would cost them virtually nothing as they’ll be showing them anyway…

It actually works with any format or form of the game they have the right too…an England t20 on ITV, an ODI on ITV4, a few blast games, maybe a county championship game…

None of that will happen but a man can dream, right?

England gather at Nottingham for a series decider against New Zealand with a civil war raging between Ben Stokes and the England and Wales Cricket Board.

Stokes is due to speak the day before the third Test and, at the moment, the ECB has no idea what he is going to say. He could apologise for what happened in a Chelsea nightclub. He could dead bat every question or he could go on the attack, his anger fed by the refusal of Rob Key and Brendon McCullum to back him in public.

Both Team Stokes and Team ECB have shifted their position during a two-week psychodrama that has left more questions than answers.

Stokes went from acting apologetic in WhatsApp groups with England’s management to threatening to retire when he felt cornered into resigning as captain, a job he said he “f------ loves” in an Instagram post in March this year. Having not even witnessed the Saracens academy player Totoa Auvaa taking a swing at Gus Atkinson, he felt the incident was blown out of all proportion by the ECB. He then dug a trench over the fact he had done nothing wrong because the curfew rules were so opaque. The Harry Brook precedent was in Stokes’s favour, too. Brook had committed a worse offence when he was punched by a bouncer in Wellington hours before he was due to captain England in an ODI but was fined, not suspended, and it was not made public.

The governing body travelled its own journey from fury over its captain breaking the rules he wanted imposed and expecting him to resign over the issue, to recognising those rules were not codified clearly enough. But as far as the ECB is concerned, it would not be in this position had Stokes gone to bed at an appropriate time.

There were also concerns that Stokes was frazzled by the job after four years as captain and a poor Ashes series. Senior figures at the ECB wondered if the pressure was making him act recklessly by going on a long drinking binge. “It’s not just about what’s happened on Sunday night,” Key said in his press conference. Stokes had, after all, been snappy and acted a little out of character before the Lord’s Test started.

Eventually it dawned on England they lacked a mandate to sack Stokes, and that public and pundit support was with the captain to carry on. England also lacked a replacement captain or all-rounder. That was hammered home in the defeat at the Oval, after which two of the three debutants were dropped from the squad.
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They had been in a tricky position when it first emerged, because they could not afford for it to come out in the media, and were also fearful of the extent of the incident, especially in an age of camera phones and CCTV.

However, a situation that could have been resolved quickly with a swift investigation, an apology from the players, but with backing for Stokes from Key and McCullum, descended into a long bureaucratic process and a new chapter in the battle between Stokes and the ECB started.

When Michael Vaughan wrote a Telegraph Sport column on Sunday night headlined “Ben Stokes and the ECB can never trust each other again”, it was briefly reposted (then deleted) by Stokes’s account. Neil Fairbrother, Stokes’s agent and confidant, as well as a long-time associate of Vaughan, also reposted the column.

The Stokes-ECB relationship crumbled over the Bristol court case in 2018. After winning England the 2019 World Cup final, Stokes told Lord Patel, an ECB board member who had criticised his conduct in Bristol, to “f--- off” when he asked for a selfie, though Patel denied this happened.

It appeared for a while that Key had brokered peace. Wearing Nike trainers and golf gear, Key was not your typical ECB suit. His relationship with Stokes was strong and he became a buffer between the captain and those at the governing body he instinctively distrusts.

The cracks opened in Australia when Stokes was unhappy with McCullum and made that plain in his end-of-tour report. But Key backed McCullum to stay and both were empowered by the ECB to carry on to the end of the next Ashes series. The fragile peace lasted one Test match at Lord’s – which England won – and the subsequent fallout has plunged the relationship to a new low. Stokes was bemused by McCullum questioning his mental health and the face-to-face meeting with Key at Durham last week is believed to have been strained.

Stokes was advised by his long-term agent, Fairbrother, and Bob Mitchell, the veteran sports lawyer who is the general counsel at the Team England Player Partnership (TEPP) – the arm of the players’ union that looks after the international teams. This was the team that started to forensically pick apart England curfew regulations. The fine print and how they were communicated are key battlegrounds. Stokes helped write them, was initially apologetic, and eventually said he did not believe they covered the end of Test matches.
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In his press conference three days after the incident, Key revealed that Atkinson was claiming not to know the curfew existed. Key gave the idea short shrift, saying players had been informed via TEPP (i.e. Mitchell) earlier this year about the new rules. The matter had also been discussed casually.

Many fans knew, because Key and others had spoken about it in the media, but Atkinson was not alone among players in claiming they did not know it existed or was in force. After the Ashes, with the Brook story fresh, England went to Sri Lanka and India for a white-ball tour and the T20 World Cup. Players on that tour were alerted to the curfew in the WhatsApp group, with a one-page document – seen by Telegraph Sport – outlining the new drinking rules: do not appear drunk in public; do not put anything on social media relating to alcohol; tell management where you are going after 9pm; and the midnight curfew. It also recommended players do not drink alcohol the night before and during matches because of its negative effect on performance, but there was no outright ban.

Atkinson was not on that tour, and there does not appear to have been a similar message or a formal sit-down to go through the rules at the Loughborough training camp before the Test summer. Some players were aware through media coverage, while others have changed their behaviour after the Australia and New Zealand tours.

Ultimately, all but two players were home before midnight after the Lord’s Test. However, McCullum was forced to admit, rather embarrassingly for him and Key, that things were not clearly spelt out enough. It is no real surprise that they were not: not only do the policies run against the instincts of Key and McCullum, but a lack of attention to detail has dogged the entire regime. As the players left Lord’s after the New Zealand win, insiders said they were reminded of McCullum’s trademark mantras of “don’t do anything that gets you in the papers” and “nothing good happens after midnight”, but not explicitly of their new bedtime.

There is even a suggestion, for instance, that England’s security guard, who ended up requiring stitches having been with the players at the Rex Rooms, was not certain if a curfew was in place. The ECB insists he did nothing wrong, and that his job was to stay with the players come what may, not usher them home at the right time.

McCullum maintained after the Oval Test that “perhaps whilst there may not have been a hard blueprint potentially, I mean like a hard factual [curfew], everyone knew what was going on”.

It was telling that when the ECB issued a statement a couple of hours later, confirming the return of Stokes and Atkinson, the word “curfew” was absent. Instead, it pointed to “specific contractual obligations that require England players to at all times maintain the highest standards of conduct and act in the best interests of England cricket”. Initially, it was said that the Cricket Regulator would not be issuing a statement, because it had not found anything worth making a statement about. But at 2pm on Monday, a statement landed, confirming there was no “regulatory breach”. It also did not contain the word curfew. Both statements seemed victories for Stokes.

Leaving McCullum’s “I’m worried about Ben” press conference last Monday, it seemed impossible that he could be back, especially as captain, for Trent Bridge. In the 48 hours that followed, however, it became clear that the ECB could not keep him on the sidelines any longer: he wanted to return, his crime was not that bad, and the regulations were hazy.

The question now is how Stokes heals the rift between himself, McCullum and Key. One important figure could be Marcus North, the recently appointed national selector who was Durham’s director of cricket until he joined the ECB just over a month ago.

North could act as peacemaker and will be trusted by Stokes. McCullum, Stokes and Key just have to find a way to work together, but this incident has shown it takes very little for old sores to break open again.

Ben Stokes is set to return to action for Durham in their County Championship match against Northamptonshire.

Stood down for the second Test against New Zealand, starting on Wednesday (June 17), while an investigation is conducted into the captain and Gus Atkinson's visit to a nightclub in the early hours of Monday (June 8), both are free to play domestic cricket.

So Stokes could be in action from Friday (June 19) when Northamptonshire arrive at Chester-le-Street in Championship Division Two, which overlaps with the final three days of the Test.

Stokes was seen training during breaks in play during the Division Two win over Derbyshire and netted on Sunday (June 14).

The allrounder, who reports suggested was considering his international future earlier this week, has already played two Championship games this season against Worcestershire and Kent.
Speaking about the prospect of there being a third, Durham Men's head coach Ryan Campbell, according to the ECB Reporters' Network, said: "With Stokes, we still don't know for sure until we get told by England, but I'm thinking it's 75 per cent he'll be playing. That's going to be an interesting selection decision."

With reports they’ll replace Stokes with a batter and go with an all seam bowling attack plus Bethell and Captain Root, has Jordan Cox’s ultra Bazball 204 for Essex just leapt him above James Rew in the pecking order?

There’s a few reasons for this so I’ll lay them out:

Firstly, the squad for the next test needs to be announced in the next day or two, you’d assume Baz will want to get the lads together over the weekend to start work for it and everyone needs to know what’s happening, so there’s a good chance we won’t have heard from Ben Stokes or know his future before that announcement. What we do know is that Stokes won’t be playing next week, so this isn’t about who his long term successor is, it is just about the next game or possibly the next two games.

Secondly, it would be, in my opinion, unfair on Harry Brook to have this as his first test as captain, this week would be difficult for even the most experienced of captains, the media are going to be relentless, he won’t be asked a single question about the actual game, it will all be about Stokes and, with his own nightclub incident still fresh in the memory, it’ll be worse for Brook.

Thirdly: Joe Root is and always has been team first, if England needs him, he’ll answer the call. He’s also known Harry Brook since he was a kid, he’s best mates with Ben Stokes, if taking on the responsibility of captain again for a week or two means he can protect them from the worst of the media, then he’ll do it.

Finally, optics, even Baz and Key, despite all there drawbacks must know the optics of making Harry Brook captain right now wouldn’t look good, Root brings stability, a change in narrative and Root is the only player they have right now who has 100% backing from the fans and the press, he’s the most experienced, he’s, quite literally with Stokes, been through it all before and will be able to bat back all questions without it having an effect on his preparation for the game.

I know someone will say “but Root was a crap captain” and whilst I dispute that, it’s not even about that this week, the on field captaincy will be what it is, what matters is not throwing your future captain in Harry Brook to the wolves and having someone who can front up to the press and steer the team through this week with the most minimum impact on preparation and that is Joe Root.