Joe Root insists the England players are “absolutely committed” to Brendon McCullum, but the hollowness of the win in Melbourne leaves the coach with a lot to prove if he is to keep his job.
The focus now will be on Sydney and whether England’s battered and weary players can raise themselves again for another dead rubber and help save the senior management from being swept away by a failed Ashes venture.
Winning a lottery on a seaming pitch at the MCG lifted morale and reset the clock as far as England’s results in Australia are concerned after almost 15 years without a victory, but they are 3-1 down and sit seventh in the World Test Championship table. They will almost certainly fail to qualify for the final, to be played in England before the next Ashes series in 2027, for the fourth time.
The Melbourne win cannot mask the mistakes in preparation and planning that Rob Key and McCullum have already owned up to. Arguably, it has made those errors appear worse with England’s seamers finally looking battle-hardened after four games in which they have adjusted to the lengths required for Australian pitches.
It exposed this group’s main weakness: their disregard for playing cricket outside of Test matches. Ben Stokes, the captain, has not appeared in any other form of the game since August 2024. His last game for Durham was two years ago.
Stokes showed strong leadership in Melbourne. He started by protecting his players as stories swirled from the Noosa trip. On Christmas Eve, he looked emotional and spoke very slowly, and deliberately, as he called for some empathy for young men caught in a media storm and he managed to galvanise them to win a low-scoring game on a tricky pitch. He is also England’s leading wicket-taker this year and led from the front with the ball.
Stokes has never seen the value in warm-up cricket, and the same goes for McCullum. Stokes has to be handled carefully after putting so much on the line physically for England, but what works for the captain does not necessarily translate to those players who do not possess his powers. England just did not adapt to Australia, treating it as any other tour with a lackadaisical approach to preparation and backroom staff; the original fast bowling coach, Tim Southee, stayed for just one game.
Australia look very vulnerable. Their batting line-up should have been exposed when the series was live. Jake Weatherald is susceptible when the ball is full and straight, and is averaging 20. Marnus Labuschagne no longer looks good enough at Test level when there is any movement off the surface. Cameron Green is averaging 18 in the series and plans to turn him into a No 3 are surely over. Usman Khawaja has managed to survive until the Sydney Test through the luck of Steve Smith’s illness in Adelaide where he was presented with a flat pitch and made runs.
Smith is averaging 40 in the series but has not hurt England and has scored only one fifty. He has scored one Ashes hundred in 14 Tests since his double century at Old Trafford in 2019.
Australia’s batting has been carried by the South Australians: Travis Head and Alex Carey. It adds to the frustration that England were unable to beat an Australian team with so many weak points, mainly because everyone was undercooked and unadjusted to the aggressiveness of Australia’s cricketing culture.
Last year’s Sydney Test against India was a low-scoring, bowler-dominated match because Australia wanted a result pitch in a tight series. The highest score in the game was 185, and Australia won mainly because Jasprit Bumrah was unable to bowl in the fourth innings.
Australia have not lost in Sydney since the 2010-11 Ashes series and England only survived by one wicket four years ago: last pair James Anderson and Stuart Broad batted out the draw. England lost by an innings and 123 in 2017-18 when Mason Crane made his one Test appearance and were thrashed by 281 runs four years previously, the match memorable for Root being dropped for the only time in his career.
The SCG curator will surely have learned from the mistakes in Melbourne and will not risk another two-dayer with the losses mounting up from Cricket Australia. A long, drawn-out match with tough days in the field will test England’s fortitude and whether they really have made any progress. That will give some clarity for the decisions about the future of the senior management.
Root believes the progress made under McCullum’s leadership means it would be “silly” to overhaul England’s management and method.
Root tasted victory in Australia for the first time this weekend, as England won the Boxing Day Test, his 18th Down Under.
Root led England in 10 of those matches, with a 4-0 defeat on the tour four years ago leading to a change in method under McCullum and Stokes, dubbed Bazball. It has been an entertaining chapter of English cricketing history, but they still lost all three live Ashes rubbers, as they have done on the past four tours.
Nevertheless, Root says the players are very much playing for Stokes, McCullum and director of cricket Rob Key, having put a desperately difficult week behind them, including the loss of Jofra Archer to injury and accusations of unprofessionalism on a mid-tour break to Noosa.
“In terms of the playing group, we’re absolutely committed to the management,” said Root. “They’ve been outstanding. You look at the group of players that we’ve got and you look at the guys that were involved in the team when I was captain, four years ago, and you look at their records individually, and every single one of them has improved as a player. This team has improved as a team. So I think it would be silly for the amount of hard work and things that have been done [to make a radical change] ...
“Clearly, it’s been a very different approach and different way of doing things, but there’s been a considerable move forward in terms of how we’ve played throughout that period. And clearly, there’s always going to be things to do and things to work on.
“And yes, we can be better and there’s certain areas that we’ll continue to keep working at but that management work extremely hard. They might do things in a slightly different way and it might appear different to what we’re used to as an English team, but I think we’ve made great strides as a group and a big reason for it is because of the guys that we have behind us.”
Root described his first victory in Australia as “bittersweet” given the Ashes were already gone.
“It feels weird,” he said. “Whenever you lose a series, it’s very disappointing. And every time you go out there, you’re doing everything you can to be on the right side of the result. I didn’t want to come here and lose another Ashes series. But unfortunately, sometimes you get outplayed, you make a few mistakes, and against good opposition, they hurt you, and that’s what happened on those occasions. But it was really important that we responded well to that and when we got our opportunities this week, we did that.”
England’s task in the final Test in Sydney will be made more difficult by the loss of Gus Atkinson, who has a hamstring injury. Matthew Potts is likely to make his Ashes debut in his place.