Many years ago, the England football team was managed by a chap called Glenn Hoddle. The story goes that one day he decided to do a session with the squad’s free-kick takers. Man-management was never really Glenn’s strongest suit, but boy could he hit a dead ball, and so, after wincing through a cluster of shanks and pea rollers from the lads, Glenn thought he’d show them how to do it, stepping up to curl a few beauties into top bins. Glenn was thrilled. He still had it. But the lads? The lads weren’t having it. They chuntered and muttered. Becks wasn’t happy, the story got out, and thus the delicate equilibrium between coach and player was further weakened. That England team wasn’t as happy as today’s cricketing equivalent. Not many are. Indeed, the Stokes-McCullum cult can lay claim to being perhaps the most nauseatingly harmonious sports team on the planet; so much so, that when a six-hitting contest the day before the Karachi Test results in a win for McCullum, prompting Stokes to hurl his bat to the skies in abject defeat, the scene plays out less like one of Glenn’s misreads than a schmaltzy buddy movie, dripping with the lathered affections of two alphas in thrall to each other’s magnificence. Neither can quit the other.
It’s objectively one of the great appointments. If Stokes (in the cold light of day) was the only viable choice, then who honestly foresaw McCullum – white-ball beast, IPL speculator, Kolkata hitter-honcho – as his right-hand man? Well, Rob Key soon did. As indeed did the equally mesmerised Andrew Strauss, tasked with advising the ECB’s top brass. His interview is the stuff of legend. “He knocked it out the park,” said Strauss. “He keeps the game of cricket very simple but he’s got a positive intent in everything he does. I know Brendon is just so excited about the prospect of not just trying to take the English cricket team forward but also doing his bit to take Test cricket forward generally.” Talk to the players and they speak in awe of his style, his charisma, of his way of sitting in perfect physical poise behind his wraparounds and in sentences of no more than seven words telling his audience what’s about to happen a beat before it does. When they get down, he speaks up. When they do well, he smiles. At Lord’s in May, where all this started, they were low after another batting collapse. That night McCullum gathered them round, cracked a beer, and told them how much fun he’d had watching them have a dart at this great thing called cricket. It sounds basic.
PHOTO BY NATHAN STIRK
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