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Well, don’t say it out loud.
“Leading in this test match,” Brendon McCullum said after the conclusion of a brutal second Ashes Test For England, 2-0 down Australia.’To be honest, I really think we over-prepared.’
A bookmark moment for Ashes tributes everywhere. The leader and co-founder of Buzzball with Ben Stokes, who was Strict on myself and teamHighlighting the crushing defeat that almost ended England’s hopes as they lost by eight wickets. People had to wait a long time for this. A referendum on a new style of play, a box office series clash between cricket’s two oldest enemies. And after six days on the pitch – it was all done.
People react differently to failures. the thing is this England Understanding the seriousness of international cricket, the team will have to take it lightly. It’s an almost impossible tightrope to cross, but it’s an admirable one nonetheless. “Make sure the top two inches are right,” has become the group’s newest catchphrase. This is understandable. Cricket is a mentally tiring game.
But leadership also resides in diplomacy. Ability to read a room. This is the leader of a team that, rightly or wrongly, has the reputation of having eleven guys who love cricket as well as beer and a round of golf. A team that has already received criticism for playing only one practice match before the tour and skipping the two-day game in Canberra. By scheduling two extra days of training before this test, don’t say that you prepared more than you actually needed to. People will laugh at you. The way this tour is going, jobs are at risk and things are moving fast, so keep it together guys.
McCullum and Stokes are tied at the hip. They stick to each other’s messages, not through media training, but through a genuine shared belief in how the game can be played, if the rest of us can understand. Tonight, his message fell apart.
“There is a saying here that Australia This is not for weak men,” said an emotional and sometimes frustrated man ben stokes When asked how England would respond. “The dressing room I am the captain of is not a place for weak people.
“I said last night, we’re where we are…I just wanted us to fight, just show some fight and we’ll see where we are.
“Nothing’s guaranteed in life, and nothing’s guaranteed in sports, but as long as you go out there and think in your mind, ‘I’m going to be here fighting all the way to the end’, that’s all you can focus on.
“What you saw from Will Jacques and me was what I mean to say, whoever has a responsibility left in this game should show fight.”
And McCullum?
“Eh, I think we’ll probably have a beer tonight.”
One man is taking this defeat more lightly than the other.
This team has never done things they don’t believe in just to please outside noise. But the difference in tone when the Captain spoke to the media several times was shocking.
Stokes himself was asked about McCullum’s comments shortly after speaking to the written press, where he went into the changing room to speak to his team. Generally, the captain is keen to complete all media duties as quickly as possible before returning to the room. Here, he spoke to TV and radio, then felt the need to return and speak to his shocked England team, before completing his final media duties.
Asked about McCullum’s comments, he said, “There’s a lot of training that you look like you’re doing just for the sake of doing it.” “You’re doing it to look right, to do the right thing, when in reality you’re not getting anything out of it.
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“There’s a saying that ‘Are you going to train to be coached, or are you going to train to dominate. I like to train to dominate, and this team does the same.’
Ever since the pair took charge, McCullum has always been the one to deliver good and bad news to individuals. Whether he has been selected or he has been dropped. It’s nothing new that the pair have taken on different parental roles in the group, but this is one where mom and dad seem to differ greatly.
The fear you can see in Stokes’s mind is that his men are not ready to fight. To make buzzball more simple, the message to the team is to ‘play nice’. Apply pressure from time to time and absorb pressure when it’s time to absorb pressure. His people are faltering on the biggest stage.
“I think a big part of it is not being able to handle the pressure of the game when the game is on the line,” he said. “In small increments, we’ve been able to get the game back under some kind of control and then let it get out of hand.”
The team now goes on a mid-series holiday to nearby Noosa, an idyllic seaside town that attracts Australia’s rich and famous. The optics, again, will be bad when, perhaps, Ben Duckett and Brayden Carse are featured on the boogie board. But they’ve got to go somewhere, and if there’s anything this team needs right now, it’s to rebuild after a few painful days. This is something Stokes is very familiar with.
“It would be completely understandable if there were some people who were feeling pressure,” he said.
“I’m not someone who’s afraid to go and check on everyone if they feel the need. We need everyone to be absolutely proactive and if there’s any concern, if there’s any doubt about what we need to do in the next three or four weeks, I want to address it and help people deal with it.
“Sometimes I feel like if you assume that someone is OK, I think that’s very dangerous. You can put on a front to avoid having those tough, difficult conversations.”
On the day Stokes talked about revealing everything, he narrated an anecdote after the Perth defeat where after the scores of 0 and 8, Joe Root came to him and apologized for his role in the defeat and said that he would get him a big century in Brisbane. Stokes asked him to never apologize, but Root still scored a century.
The Ashes is the biggest series in the lives of these players. And when everything is on the line, it’s important to get the tone right.