Brendon McCullum cares little for technique but even Joe Root can improve

All of this came to mind last week at a very wet Trent Bridge when listening to Brendon McCullum. The England head coach, to conclude the T20 series against South Africa, was doing the rounds of the press, talking firstly to Sky Sports, then to the BBC’s Test Match Special and finally us hacks.

McCullum does not do masses of media stuff but, when he does, he is always worth a careful listen, and when he mentioned technique, my attention instantly became razor sharp.

“I think there’s an over-fascination with technique,” he told the BBC. “All that does is create noise and it creates warped thinking within our minds that takes away from our ability to make good decisions in the moment and focus on what needs to be done.”

In attempting to explain Bazball in more detail, he said: “We never talk about scoring fast. We talk about absorbing pressure and transferring it, identifying the moments where you can transfer it and being courageous enough to do it. That’s the mindset that we’re about, to rip up the script of the fascination about technique and just start to get these guys to be totally present, to make good decisions and be brave enough to put pressure on the opposition when you need to.

“It’s trying to free up these guys so they’re not paralysed by a fear of failure or a fascination with technique, which I think has been quite prevalent throughout English cricket.

“I’m a firm believer that technique allows you to enter a game but it’s the ability to play the game, play the man and play the situation to adapt your tactics on any given day to be able to get the outcome you want. It’s not if you have your front arm in the perfect position or if you have your elbow at the right spot.”

Difficult as it may be to believe for some, I totally agree with Buttler and McCullum. On Buttler’s point about the basics, my coaching mantra is “head and hands”. Batting is about scoring runs and the way to do that is by trying to find the middle of the bat as often as possible. Get your head into the right position so that you are balanced (Buttler’s “base”) and then you can swing the bat efficiently and effectively, whether that is to slow the hands down to defend or to quicken them up to attack.

On McCullum’s points, he is absolutely correct that batters should never be thinking about technique once a match is in progress and probably very little about it during a series, although minor alterations such as the position of the head are easily fixed and not overburdening a player with technical information in that time frame.

But this does raise the wider question of the role of coaches at the top level, with McCullum an interesting example because he simply does not coach technique. He is more of a man-manager, tactician and strategist.

I have always held the view that the better technical coaches should be employed lower down the system in the younger age groups, where they can exert considerable influence as players learn the game as a whole, as well as their own games. That is the part McCullum is referencing when he says “technique allows you to enter a game” because without that a player is nothing.

There are a number of problems here, though. Firstly, the manner in which the overall cricket coaching set-up is designed: specifically that the higher you go, the more money you will earn, so international and franchise jobs (and the odd well-paid county post) are the only ones that really pay handsomely enough to lure the best minds away from broadcasting and the like into coaching (think Nasser Hussain and my colleague, Mike Atherton). But yet they are not really coaching jobs, more managerial positions, or as one franchise batting coach told me recently: “Just throwing balls and telling players how good they are.”

That last comment leads on to a second problem: the many negative connotations that the word technique has acquired in recent times, often spoken in a Yorkshire accent mimicking Geoffrey Boycott and therefore referencing only the defensive part of it.

The truth is that power-hitting (which in the past was just called slogging) requires as much technical thought and advice as any other part of the game. It still requires the “head and hands” principle and, even though a batter needs to clear their front leg, a common fault is opening up the body too much, too early, and therefore losing one’s swing. The best hitters will stay side-on long enough to facilitate that swing before driving their back hip and leg through.

This has led to a third problem: the curse of the funkiness of county pitches that generally dart around like hunting sticklebacks, predisposing themselves to tinkering batters with their off-stump guards and all sorts of other gimmicks in which some over-eager analysts and social-media-obsessed coaches revel.

As McCullum told the BBC: “County cricket is a very different game to Test cricket. I’m not trying to be derogatory about county cricket, it’s just if we were running a county side it would look very different to the side we’re running now. It is a different game played on different wickets.

“It is played continuously with a relentless schedule, so it is impossible to have fast bowlers bowling all the time, spinners are hardly used at certain stages of the county season, and batters who are really good on the back foot, which is a requirement in Test cricket, don’t get past five in county cricket because they get hit on the front-foot shin from something that has nibbled back.”

Which brings us neatly on to how England will prepare for the forthcoming Ashes, where back-foot play will be of paramount importance. The answer is with a white-ball series in New Zealand and then a practice match against the England Lions, which is not going down well with those who hark back fondly to England’s last victory down under in 2010-11 (the last time they won a Test there, let alone a series) and the three competitive first-class matches before the first Test.

But things have changed, as McCullum points out. Cramped calendars do not permit the time any more, and the modern player is more likely to be fatigued, as England were at the start of the recent one-day series against South Africa, than undercooked.

“If someone gave me a perfect preparation and said, ‘If you follow this you’re going to win 5-0,’ well, we’d do it,” he said. “But that doesn’t exist, so you’ve got to have conviction in how you think you can prepare guys and the team in itself. And I think over the last three years since I’ve been here, we’ve won every first Test of every series away, following the exact preparation we’re going to follow. It doesn’t guarantee us anything, but it’s the familiarity with that preparation which gives us a chance.”

And he is right about those first Tests of away series under his command. England have won in Rawalpindi in 2022, Mount Maunganui in 2023, and Hyderabad, Multan and Christchurch in 2024.

And Perth in 2025? As McCullum says, it will not be about technique, and we certainly will not be seeing some of the batters practising on one leg, as we did so comically before the Melbourne Test of the last tour, but I still think England’s batters could do with some of that work (even Joe Root, who, remember, has still not made a Test century in Australia) between now and then. Those basics, even if they take on a very different shape these days, still matter and, as even McCullum admits, are still the entry point.

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