Brendon McCullum faces a different brief: rebuilding England without Ben Stokes

On 3 July 2026, the question hanging over English cricket is no longer whether the Ben Stokes–Brendon McCullum project delivered. It did, spectacularly, and the results are still fresh enough to be quoted back. The question now is what happens when the project loses its lead actor — and whether the man brought in to manage stars is the right man to manage a rebuild. Andy Bull set that argument out in The Guardian this week, and it is one the ECB will need to answer soon.

England's Test side has a vacancy at its centre. Stokes remains officially on the books but is no longer the gravitational force that dragged the team from the doldrums of 2022 into a run of results that briefly felt like a national reawakening. The task is now to convert a stale group of senior pros into a young side, and the read from Bull is that the skillset McCullum was hired for — charm, theatre, coaxing the best out of tired performers — is not the same skillset required to blood a generation.

What McCullum was actually appointed to do

When the former New Zealand captain took the Test job alongside Stokes in May 2022, the diagnosis inside the dressing room was that England had stopped enjoying their cricket. The previous regime, whatever its tactical merits, had produced a squad that looked flat, brittle and resigned. McCullum's brief was cultural: install belief, lift the ceiling on risk-taking, give senior players permission to play without fear. In that narrow sense, the appointment was a clean success. England won more than they lost, played in a way that drew casual viewers back to the format, and gave Stokes the license to define an innings on his own terms.

The architecture of that success was always dependent on the captain being fit, available and in form. Stokes carried the side through entire sessions with bat and ball; his presence in the field lifted the tempo of everyone around him. McCullum's role was to construct an environment in which that individual brilliance could flourish, not to coach technique or build batting depth.

Why a rebuild is a different job

A rebuild asks the coach to do three things McCullum's previous brief did not require. First, to identify which of the existing senior players still belong in the side once Stokes is unavailable, and which have been carried by momentum. Second, to give consistent opportunity to players in their early-to-mid twenties — the age at which Test cricketers either establish themselves or drift. Third, to absorb failure without allowing the dressing-room mood to curdle, which is the harder of the three to manage when the public-facing results are indifferent.

Bull's point, well made, is that McCullum has never had to do any of those things in this job. He inherited a cohort that had already been picked, mostly on credit from the previous regime, and his task was to extract value from them. Whether he has the appetite to tell an ageing batter that his place is gone — or to persist with a young bowler through a rough debut summer — is genuinely untested. The instinct of the McCullum era has been to back players into form rather than drop them out of it. That is admirable in a settled side. In a transitional one, it risks producing a halfway house: too loyal to the old guard to commit to the new, too sentimental about the previous cycle to write the next one cleanly.

The counter-argument

It is worth taking seriously the view that this concern overstates the problem. McCullum is not, in any meaningful sense, the only voice in the England set-up. The ECB's high-performance system, whatever its critics, has produced a steady supply of county scorers and wicket-takers who can step up. The selectors, not the head coach, pick the side; the head coach sets the tone. A tone-setter who is sympathetic to attacking cricket may be exactly the right figure to introduce to a young player, even if his own tactical vocabulary is light on rebuild-specific language.

There is also the matter of timing. England are not, in any immediate sense, a side in crisis. The next Ashes tour is still well over a year away, and the schedule in between offers space for experimentation. McCullum will argue, fairly, that he has time to learn the rebuild vocabulary before anyone grades him on it. The most credible version of his defence is that the skills he already has — man-management, public messaging, dressing-room morale — are transferable to a younger group, even if the deliverable now is runs and wickets rather than theatre.

Stakes

If McCullum gets this wrong, the consequences are visible and slow. A Test side that fails to regenerate during a Stokes absence does not collapse — it ossifies. Senior players hang on for one more series; young players spend three seasons in and out of the side without ever establishing themselves; the dressing-room tone drifts back towards the wariness the McCullum era was hired to dispel. The cost is paid at the next Ashes, and the one after that, in results and in interest.

If he gets it right, the picture is brighter than the current narrative suggests. England have a deep red-ball queue; the county system produces bowlers; the batting depth at 22 to 26 is more crowded than it has been in a decade. A coach willing to give those players a clear run — and to be honest with the senior cohort about where they stand — could deliver a side that emerges from the Stokes era stronger than it entered. The job description has changed; the question is whether the man in the chair will accept the new brief or keep writing the old one.

The honest answer is that nobody outside the dressing room knows yet. The evidence so far belongs to a different era, and the evidence that will settle the argument has not been compiled. What Monexus can say is that Bull's framing is the right one to test against the next twelve months — and that the ECB will, fairly soon, have to choose between continuity of tone and clarity of direction.

Desk note: this piece runs one voice on a single Guardian column, framed against the structural question of what Test coaching is actually for. The wire covered the appointment in 2022; the analytical update is Bull's.