The Rescue

In early 2022, England had the worst Test team most people could remember: one win in their previous seventeen matches. The number undersells it. They had been hammered in Australia over the winter and beaten again in the Caribbean, and the manner of the defeats was worse than the defeats themselves. The batting was slow and fearful, the runs came at under three an over, and a format England had once led had started, in England, to feel like something being quietly switched off.

A team that had stopped trying to win#

It is worth being honest about how bad it had got, because nothing that came next makes sense otherwise. This was not a good side having a bad run; it was a side that had forgotten what it was for. Andrew Strauss had captained England to Ashes wins home and away, and he watched that Australia tour and kept coming back to the same point. It was not just that England lost. It was that they lost without ever really looking like they wanted to win.

"A real job, rather than talking rubbish for a living"#

The turnaround began with a rude text message. Strauss, by then off the England payroll, sent it to Rob Key, an old team-mate who had become a sharp and funny pundit for Sky: would Key be interested in a real job, rather than talking rubbish for a living? Key said he could be. That was more or less it.

The two went back a long way. They had batted together for England in the mid-2000s and once put on nearly 300 in a single Test at Lord's. Strauss went on to captain the country; Key drifted out of the Test side and into the commentary box, where the jokes hid a very good cricket brain. Now England were looking for a managing director of men's cricket, someone to take the whole thing by the scruff of the neck, and Strauss thought Key was the obvious man.

Key did not interview like a corporate candidate. Asked to describe his management style, he said he did not really have one, then explained how he actually worked: take the pressure off people, and get them looking at the chance in front of them rather than the danger. When you are calm, he argued, your brain works faster, and against a ball arriving at ninety miles an hour you need every fraction of a second you can get. There were no slides and no targets. When a panel member said it sounded like a very collaborative approach, Key simply agreed: fine, that's my style then.

Strauss had learned one lesson the hard way. After the wreck of the 2015 World Cup he handed the white-ball side to Eoin Morgan and committed to all-out aggression, and four years later England were world champions. The lesson stuck: if you are going to play that way, you cannot half-do it. Director, captain and coach all have to pull the same way, and you have to hold your nerve when it blows up in your face. He wanted a Test set-up built on exactly that.

After that, the pieces fell quickly. Joe Root resigned the Test captaincy in mid-April 2022, worn down by it. Key was appointed two days later, which mattered, because it meant he had played no part in pushing Root out. Stokes was the obvious successor, and he had told people he would only stand once Root no longer wanted the job; he was not going to take it off his closest friend. With Root's blessing, he was confirmed on 28 April. The easy part was done. Now Key had to find a coach.

The coach who had never coached#

Key had been turning the problem over for weeks, much of it in a commentary box in Pakistan, where the cricket was long and the evenings were quiet. His read on English cricket was that it thought negatively out of habit. When he was a young player, he said, the attitude towards a great bowler like Glenn McGrath was: watch out, don't do anything stupid. The Australians he came up against, Shane Warne and the Waugh twins, went the other way. The harder things got, the harder they came. He wanted a coach who believed that in his bones.

One name kept coming up: Brendon McCullum. As a player and captain he had taken a modest New Zealand side and made it punch well above its weight, mostly on attitude. He had never coached a red-ball team in his life, and for many people that ruled him out. Key thought the opposite. Experience, he liked to say, is the most overrated thing in sport: chase it and you never give anyone new a go, so how is anyone supposed to get any? It helped, too, that almost everyone assumed the job was going to Gary Kirsten, a safe and well-credentialed choice. That let Key quietly pursue the man he actually wanted.

When the call came, McCullum was coaching in the IPL and not thinking about England at all. He listened, talked it over with his wife, and rang back two days later with a question of his own. How risk-averse are you, he asked Key. Do you have the nerve to do this? It was the right question. What they were about to try would look, for long stretches, like lunacy, and it would only survive if the people above the captain held theirs when it did.

Three rules#

When McCullum finally sat down for the interview, on Zoom in a T-shirt and a cap, Key said it felt less like a job interview than a podcast. Asked how Test cricket should be played, he did not deliver a lecture. He gave three rules, one each for batting, bowling and fielding.

Batting: put the bowlers under pressure, and have the nerve to soak it up when it comes back. Bowling: always try to take wickets. Fielding: chase every ball as hard as you can, all the way to the rope.

The bowling rule carried the whole idea, and McCullum made the case with a piece of simple arithmetic. A batter who plays only to survive has two outcomes: he survives, or he gets out. A batter who plays to score has three: he scores, he survives, or he gets out. That extra outcome, the runs, is why attacking is the percentage play rather than the reckless one. You always want more options. The same went for the field: spread the men if you must, but keep a slip in, and keep trying to take the wicket rather than just save runs.

The fielding rule sounds almost too simple, until you see what it is really testing. You learn how much a player cares, McCullum reckoned, by how he chases a ball heading for the boundary. England got the gag early. In the sixth over of the new era the spinner Jack Leach tore after an edge, threw himself at it inches short of the rope, saved a single, and knocked himself out cold doing it. The instruction, made flesh.

Bigger than the Ashes#

Beneath the three rules sat something larger, and it is the bit that won Key over for good. McCullum did not talk about beating Australia. He talked about saving the format. Test cricket needs England to be good, he said; get this right and it helps keep the whole thing alive. Key found that far more powerful than any line about winning a series. A team playing to save the thing it loves, rather than to guard its own record, is a team with the weight lifted off it.

It was, in a sense, a repeat. The white-ball side had been a shambles in 2015 and world champions by 2019, rebuilt on this same fearless aggression, and McCullum had nudged some of that along through his friendship with Morgan. Now they would try it on the Test team. Everyone knew it would be harder, because red-ball cricket punishes your mistakes slowly and cruelly. But the rule was the one Strauss kept repeating. You cannot half-do it.

The name he hated#

The press needed a word, and got one before McCullum had coached a single match. On a cricket podcast on 24 May 2022, nine days out from his first Test, a journalist played on his nickname, Baz, and called the coming style Bazball, a riff on baseball. It stuck instantly and travelled absurdly far. There was a racehorse called Bazball. A prime minister claimed to see it in his own leadership. A finance magazine joked the Bank of England should give it a go.

McCullum hated the word. He felt it squashed a careful idea into a slogan and stuck him personally in the shop window, when what he wanted was his players doing the talking. Asked on television what Bazball actually was, he laughed and said he had no idea, you tell me. The players were not keen either, mostly because it had come to mean slogging, and they did not see themselves as sloggers. Late that first summer a photographer printed a badge, McCullum grinning in his shades over the words Let's Bazball, and Root took to dropping handfuls of them into the coach's golf bag to wind him up. The name never died.

What was all the hurry for?#

One story shows how far ahead of itself all this was. During the hiring, Strauss asked every candidate the same question: how would you win in Pakistan, where the pitches are flat and dead and visiting teams simply settle for a draw? Months later England did win there, at Rawalpindi, by scoring at six an over and then declaring on a road of a pitch to leave themselves time to bowl Pakistan out. Afterwards, one of the panel sent Key a half-joking text: if McCullum had said in his interview that the plan was to score at five an over and declare to set up a fifty-fifty game, would we ever have given him the job? Key's honest answer was: probably not.

Which leaves the obvious question hanging. What was all that fast scoring actually for? Not, it turns out, what most people watching assumed.