3 minute read
Under Matthew Mott, England were very bad at the 2023 World Cup, then made the semi-finals of the 2024 T20 World Cup, where they lost to India. Under Brendon McCullum, they were very bad at the 2025 Champions Trophy, then made the semi-finals of the 2026 T20 World Cup, where they lost to India. Mott was sacked, but England can accept a lower level of performance now they’ve committed to paying his replacement so much.
What were Brendon McCullum’s chances of survival ahead of the T20 World Cup? One way or another, the Ashes always elicits a media brouhaha. (Don’t you just love a brouhaha? We should all have more of them. Go and seek out some brouhahas. Start one if you need to. Enjoy yourself!) This year’s post-Ashes media brouhaha had a fair bit of focus on the coach, what with his having inadvertently lent his (nick)name to an attention-seeking style of play that didn’t ultimately warrant that attention when deployed Down Under.
In white ball cricket, the Champions Trophy, where England forgot to win any matches, hadn’t really added much lustre to his credentials either. This T20 World Cup therefore shaped up as… hmm, how to word this. Let’s say it shaped up as a trip where his job could be lost.
Pricing the pass mark
Winning the tournament would certainly have secured McCullum’s position and losing the final probably would have done so too. Failing to make the knock-out rounds would however have made for some interesting discussions about a man with a long and financially lucrative contract.
A semi-final defeat was entirely acceptable once you’ve priced the alternative opinion.
It would cost at least £1m to buy Brendon McCullum out of his current contract. Would you spend £1m on not having Brendon McCullum as England coach? Sometimes you do have to pay when you want to get rid of something, but that’s quite an outlay. It’s a lot more than the cost of hiring an eight yard skip for a few days.
We’d guess that for £1m, an awful lot of England fans can live with a coach who did after all deliver a host of unforgettable Test matches earlier in his tenure and just got England to a semi-final in which they performed entirely creditably.
Okay, they conceded a few runs in that match, but that can happen in T20 cricket. What you want in that situation is a team that can take a punch and throw one back and the fact is England stayed in contention for most of a 254-run chase.
The guy who kept them in it with a century was also Jacob Bethell, a man McCullum has taken a brave and conspicuous punt on; a man who hadn’t made a professional hundred until he made one for England; hadn’t made a first-class hundred until he made one in the Ashes; and hadn’t made a T20 hundred until he made this one in a World Cup semi-final.
Look at this very silly hundreds column, the like of which you will most likely never see again.
More broadly, there was little to object to in the way the World Cup team was put together. Really, the only consistent weakness was the openers, and they were the most obvious picks of all just a few short weeks ago, so no legitimate quibbles there.
Yes, there’s bubbling discontent with the captain in some quarters, but even those people must accept that Harry Brook is a better option than the limited overs captain McCullum inherited – which is also why the woeful Champions Trophy performance can be downgraded in significance.
In conclusion
Is Brendon McCullum the greatest cricket coach in history; a man who’s reinventing the entire game after striking a hitherto unimagined seam of bottomless psychological gold? No, he is not.
Is it worth paying a seven-figure sum to have him coach some other team so that you can instead recruit… who exactly? Justin Langer?
On balance, we’d say not.