The Ashes are still technically alive but recriminations have already begun in England with calls for the sacking of captain Ben Stokes, coach Brendon McCullum and ECB managing director Rob Key.
The Times cricket correspondent Simon Wilde led the charge by saying the power trio needed to be removed with England staring down the barrel of a third straight heavy defeat in Adelaide and the likelihood of a 5-0 series thrashing.
He said McCullum’s Bazball mantra had backfired to make them a laughing stock.
“The England cricket team have become a fundamentally unserious operation, even if people admired — and perhaps loved — what they originally set out to do,” he wrote.
“There had been warnings as to the risks of this approach but it is only now, up against Australia in their own conditions — where they know how to turn themselves into one of the most ruthlessly efficient teams in all sport — that the flaws in McCullum’s approach have been laid bare.
“Surely only a management group that have completely underestimated the task at hand would back a spinner in Shoaib Bashir who does not even hold a county contract and has not bowled in a competitive match for months, a wicketkeeper who does not keep regularly for his county in Jamie Smith, and a spare batsman in Jacob Bethell who is only 22 and has never scored a first-class century.
“Key, McCullum and Stokes got their jobs on the back of demands for improvement after the disastrous tour to Australia four years ago. But this one has arguably been worse, and certainly more careless. They can’t all survive.”
The Telegraph’s Nick Hoult echoed the theme that changes are needed with another 5-0 flogging on the horizon.
“All that hope the Bazballers inspired has evaporated and jobs are on the line in Melbourne and Sydney. Stokes and Joe Root will never know what it feels like to win a live Ashes Test in Australia and the possibility of a third Ashes whitewash in Australia in 20 years is an unpalatable reality for England.
“At the start of the tour, when the air was filled with promise, Stokes described those England captains who had won in Australia as the ‘lucky few’ and believed he had the arsenal to join the five to win an away Ashes since the second world war.
“Now all he can hope for is winning a dead rubber and ending the 15-year drought for any Test win in Australia.
“Changes are inevitable for Melbourne. This is the end of the road for Ollie Pope, and it may well be kinder to put him out of his misery than keep giving him chances in the hope he will come off.”
Barney Ronay at The Guardian highlighted Harry Brook’s moment of madness in getting bowled while reverse-sweeping Nathan Lyon as a fitting epitaph for the Bazball era.
“No child is born playing performative reverse-hoicks with a Test match to be saved, just as most acts of cult-like behaviour have their roots in a smooth-talking cult-like instructor.
“Brook’s dismissal in Adelaide was at least a tell, a moment of anti-gaslighting. No, you really didn’t imagine all that. For the England regime, a hard stop is now in sight, and in the usual way of these things, in the fire of an overseas Ashes immolation.
“The French have a phrase, l’esprit de l’escalier, to describe the sudden realisation of what you should have said all along, the riposte you only think of when you’re already halfway down the stairs.
“For three hours in Adelaide, England seemed to be producing their own cricket de l’escalier, bristling suddenly with resistance and application but doing this on the exit stairs of a burning building that has already been flame-throwered in Perth and Brisbane. So now you want to fight?”
He described Brook’s petulant shot as “a perfect demonstration of talent being wasted; of game situations thrown away; and of how scrambled and strange some of the messaging is”.
“Mainly it was the most predictably unpredictable moment. England’s style has been about this, a performative individualism that feels increasingly mannered.
“What in that case does Brendon McCullum actually do? Because it’s definitely not coaching, scheduling or attention to detail. If not big-picture thinking, what do we actually need him for?
“Is the cost of getting rid of McCullum now reason enough to keep him? Should 2-0 become 5-0 in January, the last really Baz move on the board would be to take matters into his own hands.”
Former England skipper Mike Atherton said Ben Duckett’s careless waft at Pat Cummins on four from the second ball of his innings summed up the perils of the Bazball approach.
“Perhaps nobody embodies the emasculation of this England team on this tour, and the emasculation of the philosophy that has underpinned their challenge, more than Duckett,” he wrote in The Times.
“The unorthodox, rasping opener who prides himself on how few balls he leaves at the top of the order, but who departed the crease practising his leave, and who, when it mattered, played a nothing shot, full of lack of conviction.
“Changing a habit is so hard under pressure, and his bat was drawn magnetically to the ball, half-heartedly. He hung it out there, edged and was gone.”
At The Independent, Cameron Ponsonby said careers will be over after this tour disaster, singling out Zak Crawley and Ollie Pope, who have underperformed for around 60 Tests each.
“Careers end in Australia. Of the 50 men to play for England on an Ashes tour this century, 26 have never played for their country again.
“You can’t be a player of potential forever. And the returns for Pope have never arrived.
“Crawley continues to tease. As of the end of the 2025 summer, no batter in Test history had opened the batting so often, but averaged so little. He started the Ashes with a pair, but unlike Pope, whose initial failure overwhelmed him, Crawley brushed it off and came back with quality. A 76 and 44 at Brisbane impressed and frustrated in equal measure. So too his 85 here.
“His contributions have been excellent innings that were gone too soon. It is unclear whether they are evidence of his career turning a corner or if they are instead one final gaslighting.”
The Daily Mail’s Lawrence Booth was also adamant Pope should be the first player removed from the line-up for the fourth Test in Melbourne.
“We have been here before, of course, this strange territory where every Pope failure seems to entrench his place at No 3, to encourage the management to double down on his value.
“But his latest misadventure took his tally for the series to 125 runs at 20. And with the exception of his first 30-odd runs on the long-ago opening day at Perth, the experience of watching him has not been relaxing.
“Pope is now 64 Tests into his career, yet if anything his jumpiness outside off stump, his tendency to stab at the ball like a teenager prodding dinner with a fork, has got worse.”
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