England cricket boss Rob Key lucky to survive after Brendon McCullum gets the chop as test coach

Tuesday, 14 July 2026

ANALYSIS: Something had to give. The results and chaos around the test team demanded change and it is Brendon McCullum who has paid the penalty, with his removal as test head coach. The team have lost seven out of their previous nine matches, are languishing near the bottom of the World Test Championship and have been fighting for their reputation as a serious, professional outfit, following incessant stories about preparation, alcohol and discipline.

It is right, therefore, that there will be significant change. McCullum had a hugely positive impact in his first two years, following his appointment in early 2022, helping to breathe new life, direction and energy into a broken team. But he is not the man to drive sustained improvement in less experienced players, which is what England have now, after the retirements of, for example, James Anderson, Stuart Broad and Ben Stokes. Progress had long since stalled.

England had come up short against the best test teams, Australia and India, and the recent home series defeat by New Zealand showed how much improvement is required. Change rarely comes when a team are in shipshape condition and the fact that, as Rob Key, the England managing director, admitted only weeks ago, there are only two serious candidates for captaincy shows the weaknesses of the present set-up. Key described the test team as “well set and poised” to achieve great things, but there is lots of work to do. McCullum helped to transform them initially, but has not left them in great shape.

This change was coming. As with Stokes, whose retirement should be seen in the context of the broader Ashes failure, rather than the more recent disciplinary issue and fallout of the New Zealand series, the end of McCullum’s tenure has been building for a while. Shortcuts were taken in preparation for the Ashes; the game punished them for that, left them with little wriggle room thereafter and McCullum has paid the penalty as events subsequently ran away from him.

This, though, remains a messy situation and throws up all kinds of questions and issues. What does it say, for example, about the judgment of Richard Gould and Richard Thompson, who doubled down on Key, McCullum and Stokes at the end of the Ashes, but have lost two of these key men within six months? A more judicious call at the end of the Ashes might have been cleaner and less disruptive than what has transpired and would have prevented the past six months of waste.

One of the issues is the lack of cricket knowledge on the ECB board. Only Ebony Rainford-Brent has playing experience, though this will be bolstered by Ed Smith’s arrival in October, which cannot come soon enough. More experience could have resulted in greater questioning, for example, around England’s Ashes preparations and might have helped form a sharper review of the winter.

Gould has been partly conditioned by his experiences in football (and as the son of a football man) and is eager (and fair enough, this) not to see cricket descend into the kind of cycle of sackings that characterises the national game. So even as belatedly as day one of the Oval test, Gould and Thompson were still confident in the decision to stick by their men.

It was felt that the Lord’s test had gone well on the field; that preparation had been sharper, which was reflected in the quality of play and that McCullum had shown a willingness to change post-Ashes. Clearly, the messy fallout from the disciplining of Gus Atkinson and Stokes for breaching a midnight curfew, the lack of attention to detail that allowed that story to explode way beyond where it needed to be, and the self-indulgent way England played on that crazy fourth afternoon at Trent Bridge, followed by the series defeat on the fifth, convinced them that the status quo was impossible.

What now for Key, who, as this falls on his watch, has been severely damaged by the past nine months? Gould confirmed not only that Key will continue in the role but also that he sees him in it for the long-term. There is no question that Key is fortunate and that he cannot afford his next pick as test coach to go wrong. As Gould said, while offering his backing, things can change quickly. After all, he offered the same reassurances about learning from experiences at the end of the Ashes, and look what has happened to McCullum.

This change, then, is also belated acknowledgment of what a mistake it was for Key to have extended McCullum’s brief in late 2024 to include the white-ball teams. Things started to go wrong for McCullum from the point at which he took on the white-ball roles in early 2025. Tactical and strategic mistakes were made in the Champions Trophy that followed, as McCullum’s touch deserted him and confidence in him began to weaken.

Now, rightly, England are set to split the roles again. The schedule is such that it is impossible for one coach to do it all. This India series, for example, began two short days after the end of the test series. How can a coach possibly prepare for one series while in the middle of another? How could McCullum, for example, suitably review the failures against New Zealand in the test series, while focusing on the white-ball series against India?

Having lost Stokes as captain and now McCullum as test coach, Key has got work to do to build relationships. He has to find a way to make McCullum feel backed and wanted, even though he has just been party to removing him as test coach only 18 months after giving him the keys to the kingdom. He has to find a way of building a strong relationship between McCullum and the new test coach, even as McCullum admits to feeling “gutted” about losing the test job. And he has to solve the thorny problem of the test captaincy.

Who are the potential coaches for the test role? As written at the end of the Ashes and more recently, the outstanding candidate is Andy Flower, who is at the top of his game, and who could combine the test role with his IPL gig. While refusing to speculate on Flower specifically, Gould admitted that England would be prepared to be “progressive” in their thinking around test and franchise availability. How much better it would have been had Key made contact with Flower in January, before the Ashes review happened. The possibility of Flower should be explored before all else.

Part of the reason for keeping McCullum in the white-ball role is the relationship he has built up with Harry Brook, which is clearly special. McCullum seemed to set down a marker at the end of the T20 series, by describing Brook’s qualities and captaincy in such glowing terms, and, assuming that a McCullum-Brook combination is a given in white-ball cricket, where does that leave the captaincy of the Test team? What applies to the difficulties of coaching across all three formats, is magnified by playing and captaining across them.