Of the England bowlers who won the first Test for England, Ben Stokes, Gus Atkinson and Ollie Robinson are all, for one reason or another, unavailable for selection for the second Test. In now time honoured fashion, Brendon McCullum has weighed this pace bowling shortfall and concluded the best way to react would be by dropping the spinner, Shoaib Bashir. This is hardly surprising given he’s now working with Joe Root, who kind of started this whole spinner-free trend in the first place.

Jofra Archer, Matt Fisher and Sonny Baker are to join Josh Tongue in a four-man attack. If the pitch does spin, England will turn to Root and Jacob Bethell. The fact they have multiple options is significant because if you’ve got two mediocre-to-poor spin bowlers, you can fail to make the most of conditions at both ends.

The first thing to note here is that Bashir didn’t do anything wrong in the first Test. The second thing to note is that he didn’t do anything right in the first Test either. He didn’t do anything. The Home of Quagmires rendered him superfluous and he didn’t bowl a single ball.

But – key detail here – the Oval is a different pitch. It may be only four miles away as the crow flies, but different people do different stuff with it and it is consequently a different thing. There’s been much talk about how Surrey haven’t bothered playing spin bowlers in recent years, but less talk about how they’ve mostly been labouring their way through arduous, high-scoring draws this season while working to that same philosophy.

We would play a spinner. But then we would always play a spinner.

Aside from all the strategic reasons and our belief that Test cricket is all about evolving conditions and presenting batters with diverse challenges, failing to play a spinner also smacks of poor personnel management.

Maybe Root didn’t have much of a say in this one, but it’s hard to avoid thinking back to that time he and Chris Silverwood thought it would be a great idea to pick five right-arm fast-medium bowlers in Australia. Those two repeatedly went out of their way to pick no-one at all over Jack Leach and Jack Leach responded by losing all joie de vivre and deteriorating as a Test bowler.

Root and Silverwood have the Jack Leach that they created

England lost a lot of matches around that time and that resulted in Silverwood no longer being coach and Root no longer being captain.

They were replaced by McCullum and Stokes and initially these two went the other way: they picked Leach for every game.

Where their predecessors had said not merely that they didn’t rate Leach, but that they didn’t even value spin bowling as a craft, the new fellas picked him every game and Stokes gave him bags of overs. Sometimes he even asked him to open the bowling.

It was largely injury that saw Leach slip down the pecking order, which meant that when England continued picking Bashir after he recovered, it kind of came across as a big vote of confidence. ‘We think you’re better than our previous first choice who we clearly loved’ kinda thing. The bowler himself felt this to the extent he started to believe he was almost twice as tall as he actually is.

But then England stopped picking Bashir, and they stopped picking a real spinner, and they’re still doing it, and honestly it’s all starting to feel depressingly SilverRootish again.

And that’s where we are: Gus Atkinson’s on the naughty step, Ben Stokes stayed out past his bedtime and Ollie Robinson’s found a back way out of the team again, so England have dropped their spin bowler.

We’ll ask the question again: How tall does Shoaib Bashir feel right now?

So how tall does Shoaib Bashir feel right now? (Presumably not 10 feet tall)

Over the last 24 hours, we’ve been steering our exasperation towards amusement through the simple tactic of mentally rewriting all references to England curfews so that they’re instead about bedtimes. The two things are much the same, after all. Doing this swap is funny and it also helps highlight how really very silly all of this has got. 

Silly or not though, there’s plenty of talk this monumental temporal crime could be the end of Ben Stokes, the England cricketer.

Just look at the headlines: 

• Test captain considering his future after bedtime incident
• Stokes England captaincy on line after bedtime breach 
• Stokes to hold crisis talks after staying up past his bedtime

Some would say a great England cricketer deserves a better end than this, but we would counter that it would be hard to manufacture an exit even half as striking and unexpected as Stokes’s career has been. Maybe this is fitting. Maybe it’s an opportunity he needs to grasp. 

From getting hit in the dick and immediately confirming, “Oof, right in the dick!” over the stump mic to playing one of the most preposterously bipolar innings of all time, Ben Stokes has always been a spectacularly zany cricketer. We cannot really envision a zanier finish than being pushed out of the game because he stayed up past his bedtime on his birthday.

What is the most staggering aspect of Ben Stokes and Gus Atkinson’s involvement in a nightclub “incident”?

History has changed. If you google “Ben Stokes nightclub incident,” you now see an entirely different Ben Stokes nightclub incident than the one that’s been at the top of the results page for the last nine years. If you’re catching up on the details, this new one – which we’ll call Ben Stokes Nightclub Incident 2.0 – also features Gus Atkinson and a Saracens rugby player. 

Follow on… (That means ‘continue reading’)

History has changed. If you google “Ben Stokes nightclub incident,” you now see an entirely different Ben Stokes nightclub incident than the one that’s been at the top of the results page for the last nine years. If you’re catching up on the details, this new one – which we’ll call Ben Stokes Nightclub Incident 2.0 – also features Gus Atkinson and a Saracens rugby player. 

Sage words there. Sage words from a cricketer who knows the perils that unavoidably go hand in hand with heading out for a few jars after a Test win. Sage words from Ben Stokes in 2019.

The sentiments expressed above convey roughly where Ben Stokes Nightclub Incident 1.0 got filed away in the end. The crime wasn’t what he did. The crime was being there.

Yet here we are again. Or rather… there he was again.

What does this mean? Is this the end?

It has to be said, the Ben Stokes Nightclub Incident that has been freshly wiped from page one of the search results suggests these sorts of things certainly needn’t be a barrier to playing for England. 

You may forget this because it’s such a weird fact, but on that occasion Stokes’ suspension was actually lifted the moment he was charged with a criminal offence. He was of course subsequently cleared of affray and later assumed the England Test captaincy. There might be a weird echo of this occurring elsewhere in the team.

Harry Brook was involved in another “incident” in a nightclub over the winter. It was a pretty major reason why the England players are now subject to a humiliating curfew, like schoolchildren or GPS-tagged convicted burglars.

Stokes surveyed that strict moral landscape and led by example and you feel he’ll be judged on that basis. This was not just going out and breaking a curfew, it was doing it as captain when England players were being restricted precisely because of previous incidents like the one that apparently ensued. That could be that for Stokes, unfortunately. Consequences.

Except this means that having very much set the ball rolling on this recent trend for misjudged night-time activity, Test vice captain Brook is now poised for a promotion because of the backdrop he himself created.

Nightclub incidents?

But none of these things are, to our mind, the most astonishing aspect. Maybe there are some reporting inaccuracies here, but the most staggering detail is surely the plain, straightforward fact that Ben Stokes went to a nightclub.

What year is it? 1998? Who honestly goes to nightclubs in this day and age? The youths certainly don’t – Gen Z are the most sober group of all – and middle-aged people obviously don’t either because they’re middle-aged.

You might argue that Ben Stokes falls between these groups, dodging both trends, but we’d argue he’s at the nexus, subject to both. Ben Stokes is a 35-year-old father of two who spends his entire working life mixing with 20-somethings. He has a foot in both camps, he knows both worlds, and yet he actively made a decision to go to a nightclub?

None of this makes sense.

It’s become one of the great, weird, modern cricket clichés that Brendon McCullum has the ability to make players feel they are an incorrect height. (Invariably taller, invariably 10 feet.) But he doesn’t always make them feel that, does he? We’d be interested to know what height Shoaib Bashir currently believes himself to be, for example.

McCullum has previously said that his job is to make, “all those that sit in the dressing room feel like they can be 10 foot tall and bulletproof when they walk out to play.”

Upon his appointment by England, New Zealand’s Henry Nicholls (Hinry Knuckles to you) conveyed his heartfelt belief that his former captain was possessed of precisely this ability. “He gave everyone around him a lot of confidence and sort of made you feel like you were 10 feet tall and bulletproof,” he said.

Around the same time, Ben Stokes concurred that this was his new colleague’s USP: “He is all about making everyone feel, in his words, ’10 feet tall’.”

It’s a slightly weird goal. How would you actually feel if you were 10 feet tall? Gangly? Awkward? Hugely self conscious? Maybe you have a different perception of these things if, like McCullum, you’re only 5ft 7in yourself.

Everyone seems to buy into this artificial height inflation in any case. James Anderson said that midway through that first Test, McCullum spoke to the whole team and afterwards, “we all felt 10 feet tall.” (Maybe it was because they were towering over him. Or maybe he was standing far away.)

Speaking after the match, Stuart Broad went even further, saying the whole environment was now geared towards incorrectly gauging one’s height. “It’s not too structured,” he said of the new England setup. “It’s just a case of what do you need to do to make you feel you’re 10 foot tall?”

Stuart Broad: Titan of Ridiculousness

We could easily go on and on with this. (Josh Tongue: “I’m lucky to work under two coaches who make you feel 10 feet tall.” Sam Billings: “It’s to the point, it’s clear, it’s clarity, and it’s about making you feel 10 feet tall.”) But you get what we’re saying: Brendon McCullum’s philosophy is all about inculcating misconceptions about height.

The shrinking potion

But not everyone feels 10 feet tall do they? Some people might have felt 10 feet tall for a bit, but not many are banging their heads on the doorframe on the way out of the team.

This morning, Andy Bull gave a striking rundown of the 11 titans who played in that first Test match when the world was so small and the sky was so blue. Of those, Alex Lees, Zak Crawley, Ollie Pope, Jonny Bairstow, Ben Foakes, Matt Potts, Stuart Broad, James Anderson and Matt Parkinson have all now exited the stage.

Even if Ben Foakes is “the best wicketkeeper in the world” he’s only worth so much to England

Look through those names and only Broad can possibly have retained all of his artificially acquired height. All the rest were handed a tape measure and reality check.

Which brings us to Shoaib Bashir.

Upon becoming England’s youngest player to 50 Test wickets, Bashir said: “I walk into this England team and I feel 10 feet tall because of the backing I get, and that makes a massive difference. I feel like I’m very well backed here. I’m well backed in county cricket as well, but I feel like England cricket is my happy place.”

So how tall did he feel when England so conspicuously stopped backing him, over the winter?

Still no Shoaib Bashir then. Do you remember when Ben Stokes used to back his spinners?

When everything was on the line in the big A-rated target series, England concluded they didn’t really trust Bashir. They didn’t just leave him out of the team; they omitted him in favour of someone who was only ever going to be a buyer of wickets and a scorer of meaningless consolation runs.

Now Bashir’s back, but surely not at the towering height of old, because it’s a lot harder to give a player a Goliath complex when you were the one responsible for the previous shrinkage.

It can be done, of course, but where Ollie Robinson has been brought back and embiggened with a conspicuous, growth hormonal, “We really want you, mate,” Bashir has simply seeped back into the team. He is essentially filling a void that was first created when England reappraised his height when the stakes were at their highest.

Reselection therefore doesn’t come across as a big vote of confidence in Bashir’s ability. Not really. It’s not nothing – England clearly kind of like him – but he’s no longer being buoyed by the unequivocal Baz boosterism that he himself said was previously helping him so much.

So what height do you attribute to yourself with this kind of qualified support? In reality Shoaib Bashir is 6ft 4in – but how tall does he currently feel?

In the wake of England’s most successful Ashes tour for 15 years, it was widely agreed that some England players needed to play smarter and so that is what Brendon McCullum has promised to deliver henceforth. Some players didn’t need to play smarter though. One in particular has built an enviable record through his absolute wholehearted commitment to playing the daftest cricket he can imagine.

No-one’s saying Harry Brook had a great Ashes, even though he was England’s second-highest run-scorer and pretty much averaged 40. However, the fact those returns were seen as a colossal failure is because of what preceded them.

Did you see… Harry Brook’s first ball in Melbourne? Unquestionably the 2025/26 Ashes’ finest moment

Brook’s witless self-destruction and addiction to circus flourishes has so far furnished him with a Test batting average of 54.79. Plaintive cries that his approach means he’s not making the most of his talent rather overlook that simple fact. No-one has averaged that much for England since the 1960s. We’d therefore argue that, if anything, Brook has hit upon a way of transcending his talent.

The last time England played New Zealand saw Brook at his daft best. In the first Test, he frittered away several lives while taking England from 45-3 to 381-6 via a personal score of 171. In the second Test, he walked out at 26-3 and when England fell to 50-4, he responded with an onslaught of fours and sixes, adding 22 to the total in his next seven balls.

He finished with 123 off 115 balls with 11 fours and five sixes. 

It was Peak Harry Brook.

Are we already watching peak Harry Brook?

He was going pretty well at this point. The month before, he’d hit 317 off 322 balls against Pakistan – England’s first triple hundred since Graham Gooch’s 333 against India in 1990.

Shackleslessness

Last time New Zealand toured, the whole England team needed pulling in a more carefree direction. Some did better out of this group recalibration than others, but almost everyone benefited to some degree. McCullum’s was a broad message that initially brought a massive net positive.

It was a neat trick and very well executed, but having already secured those gains, McCullum’s coaching method of continuing to say much the same things in the hope that things would continue getting better and better clearly didn’t work. England didn’t really get any further. If anything, they went backwards because several of the newer, younger players would in fact have benefited more from being steered in the opposite direction.

Ollie Pope, for example. “I was probably just too eager to put the bowlers under pressure without necessarily realising it at the time,” he conceded of his own Ashes failures. 

In short, the wider team messaging was doing him few favours.

Is Ollie Pope still in the same galaxy as the England Test team?

This is a bit of a side point, but there’s actually a case here that the players who would benefit most from McCullum’s new post-Ashes goal of becoming “slightly smarter in some of those key moments” are the likes of Pope and Zak Crawley, who aren’t around any more.

And while those players were clearly pulled too far from their own, personal optimal approach, responding to that by turning the whole ship around now risks blunting the effectiveness of the players who did respond well.

For example, as mad as it sounds, floating the notion that there are times when you shouldn’t bat like a complete dingbat could stymie England’s most dynamic batter. Batting like a complete dingbat is never the answer, but you also don’t want to steer Harry Brook too far away from that, because evidence suggests his peak performance level – a level that is really quite fantastically accomplished – sits quite a long way towards the dingbat end of the spectrum.

Team philosophies are hazardous matter in a game that is to a great extent won and lost by individuals. What might land as a sensible bit of advice for one team member can destructively undermine another.

You don’t want Harry Brook trying to bat like Jacques Kallis. You want to get the best out of him, and to do that, you want to keep him just about within touching distance of dingbat.

Send your pictures of cricket bats and other cricket stuff in unusual places to king@kingcricket.co.uk. Please consider putting the cricket thing in the unusual place yourself. We like those ones.

We took The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments to Warwick Castle during October half-term.

It seemed a little nonplussed by the castle stuff and didn’t want to engage with various Halloween themed elements, like the headless horseman. It did however enjoy the playground and in particular the Zog slide.

It’s Father’s Day in a week or two

…or three (June 21).

Shipping times being what they are, it might be worth dropping a few subtly worded hints to your kids to, “PLEASE GET ME THIS EXACT BOOK: FOLLOW THIS LINK AND BUY IT FROM HERE.”

You can also get The 50 Most Ridiculous Ashes Moments from…

• Amazon (where it appears to be £13.01 at the minute)
• Waterstones
• TG Jones
• Awesome Books (£12.32)
• Blackwell’s

An historic day. Not many teams get the better of Ireland in Test cricket. New Zealand today inflicted only their second ever defeat in home conditions and their first by an innings. Extraordinary stuff.

Even more amazingly, New Zealand had never before got the better of Ireland, home or away. Throw in the fact Ireland’s only previous home defeat was to Pakistan, way back in 2018, and you’d have got long odds on this result before the schedule was agreed and the fixture was inked-in (whenever that was).

Not many teams come to Ireland and win a Test match. England have never done it, for example – although they have at least notched that difficult first Test victory over them, thanks to Jack Leach’s second-silliest innings.

There’s hope there and in New Zealand’s success for the likes of poor enfeebled India, Australia, South Africa and the West Indies, who are all yet to get off the mark against the mighty Irish.

Ireland now and then and maybe again

When England first played Ireland in a Test match four years ago, we had visions of it becoming an annual fixture with a slowly developing history. We’ve followed England cricket long enough to know there was pretty much zero chance that would happen, but the prospect only seemed more remote during the second Test match between the two nations.

Read more…

Neither Ireland nor New Zealand play too many Test matches and the Irish players don’t even have a domestic red ball structure to fall back on. You may therefore conclude that there hasn’t been any recent first-class cricket from which we might weigh form ahead of this week’s Test match. But you would be wrong.

Last week, Ireland cricket paid tribute to the great decade of the 1980s by putting on a first-class fixture between two teams named after hugely culturally significant events of the era – specifically, the greatest archeological adventure film of all time, and the British coal industry response to proposed pit closures (action which was supported by massive financial contributions from Irish trade unions).

Ireland now and then and maybe again

When England first played Ireland in a Test match four years ago, we had visions of it becoming an annual fixture with a slowly developing history. We’ve followed England cricket long enough to know there was pretty much zero chance that would happen, but the prospect only seemed more remote during the second Test match between the two nations.

Read more…

Raiders v Strikers was a hard-fought match that saw the latter emerge victorious, in large part thanks to 120 from Perth-born opener Jake Egan. Will his track record of hitting a century in every single first-class match he ever plays (Raiders v Strikers, May 2026) be enough to earn him a Test debut as Paul Stirling’s replacement? We’ll get our answer shortly.

Ireland v New Zealand starts later today at the Civil Service Cricket Club in Belfast. The good news is that it’s on TNT Sports if you forgot to cancel your subscription after the last cricket you gave a shit about (maybe an Ashes, possibly a World Cup).

Alternatively, it’s worth heading down in person if you’re anywhere nearby because both the weather and the ground look… first-class.

Pakistan play three Tests in England later this summer. You can never be entirely sure what you’re going to get from Pakistan, but it does feel like the range of unpredictability has been narrowing for a good few years now; the moments of unexpected brilliance growing ever fewer and further between. Looking ahead to that series, not only do we not know quite what we’re hoping for any more, we don’t even really know who we’re hoping to get it from.

At a certain point in middle age, your brain pretty much gives up on associating specific names with family members and pets and instead deposits them all into one big bag. From them on, whenever you need to attract someone’s attention – most likely to stop them doing something – you simply dip into the bag of names and pull one out out.

Sometimes it’s the right name. Sometimes it isn’t. Precision is for the young. As long as you’ve shouted a familiar name, what more can you honestly do?

We’re not saying Pakistan have adopted the same policy when selecting their Test team of late, but it’s… similar. Cast your eye down a given scorecard and while the names are familiar, there isn’t much continuity.

What is the Pakistan Test team these days? We have no idea. Mohammad Rizwan and Shan Masood, we suppose. Salman Agha seems to be there as often as not. Babar Azam when he isn’t injured. But who are the bowlers?

Pakistan have played 13 Tests in the last two years and their most capped bowlers in that time are Noman Ali and Sajid Khan, the ageing emergency rescue team they whistled up after Harry Brook hit that triple hundred. They’ve played seven Tests each.

Let Noman wheel away unchanged

After them, it’s Khurram Shahzad with six appearances and then Shaheen Afridi with five. Afridi is probably the closest thing Pakistan have to a first-choice bowler and he’s played barely a third of their recent Tests. And it’s not like he’s even been any good when he has played – he’s taken 13 wickets at 40.46.

This week Pakistan had the honour of becoming the first team to be whitewashed in successive series of two or more matches by Bangladesh. No one prefixes their name with “perennial whipping boys” any more, but Bangladesh still aren’t what you would call a Test cricket powerhouse.

And it’s not just Bangladesh. Pakistan have now lost seven away Tests in a row. They haven’t won overseas since beating Sri Lanka in July 2023.

Who is going to get them out of it? Osman Samiuddin describes it as, “exactly the kind of mishmash XI, of stalled, interrupted and stagnated careers, you’d expect after years and years of very poor player management.” He also believes the national team is, “demonstrably the worst place to be for [young players] to maximise their potential.”

For this summer at least, they have Mohammad Abbas, but preparing for each tour by sending a key player away to build a decade of overseas domestic experience isn’t really a sustainable plan.

Mohammad Abbas could get hold of your phone number (and so could Naseem Shah)

There are winners and losers with every England Test squad announcement, but the first one after an Ashes tour tends to feature bigger, clearer signposts for the years ahead. Ollie Pope looks to be one of the less immediately obvious casualties of the greater disloyalty Rob Key promised us.

Looking back on the piece we wrote in March about the likely beneficiaries and victims of this new policy, we pretty much got it spot on. (Broken clocks and all that.)

Jamie Smith is not out; Zak Crawley is out; Will Jacks is out; Matt Potts is now behind at least five other seamers – probably more; while Jofra Archer and Mark Wood are neither in nor out.

It’s time for some unsettling disloyalty: If England’s leaders aren’t being ejected then some of the players will be… but which ones?

We didn’t predict Sarah Taylor’s heartening promotion to the previously undervalued role of fielding coach (damn that’s a good move), but we did make a point of stating that Pope would still be out. That may have seemed redundant given he’d already been dropped from the XI midway through the Ashes, but the nature of touring meant he was still in the vicinity of the team back then. Yesterday, we got a clearer sense of where he now stands.

And where does he stand, exactly?

Earlier this year, we spent a period repeatedly falling asleep during episodes of the Star Wars series, Ahsoka. The finer points of the plot are a bit hazy, what with the whole not being conscious thing, but we’re pretty sure one of the key elements is that Grand Admiral Thrawn – an imperial leader who apparently blue himself – is stranded in another galaxy.

That’s a long way away, isn’t it? That’s not a place where you want to find yourself stranded. People casually hop about from planet to planet in Star Wars, but another galaxy? No-one wants to be a million light years from home – particularly if you’re reliant on the whims of passing space whales to get back again.

Pope is probably not in space whale territory, but he’s no longer in England’s first team and the squad tells us he’s now behind James Rew as well. Chances are he’s even further back in the queue than that.

Without going to the trouble of finding actual quotes, Key will have announced the return of Ollie Robinson by saying something along the lines of, ‘there’s always a route back into the England team, the door is never closed on anyone’ – or clichés to that effect. But what is the route for Pope now? And how long is it?

(Dis)prove yourself

The problem Pope’s got is one that many mid-career dropped players face: he’s played a lot of Test cricket. As with Crawley, that means his task is not really to prove himself, but to disprove himself. England already have a pretty good idea how Pope will perform because he’s already played 64 Tests.

Here we can draw a distinction with Crawley, because Pope has been… okay. Where Crawley’s record is standard-settingly woeful for batters who have played so many games (five hundreds in 64 Tests and an average of 31.18), Pope has made nine hundreds and averaged 34.55. He’s basically Mark Butcher.

There’s worse company to keep, but that’s also roughly the point at which Butcher’s career ended. Patience wears ever thinner at this sort of performance level and Pope can no longer make himself more appealing with a ‘youthful promise’ free gift.

However, unlike Crawley, Pope is actually up against it a bit if he wants to change people’s minds through weight of runs in first-class cricket. Crawley averages 31.49 in first-class cricket and were that number to start tracking upwards, one might reasonably assume it was the result of some meaningful improvement to his game.

But Pope is tarred by his own achievements – he has always made first-class runs. Back in 2022, when he was averaging 33 in Test cricket, Wisden reported that his non-Test first-class average was 66.42.

In other words, Ollie Pope is a man who can perform better than almost anyone in the entire history of first-class cricket and yet still play worse than Mike Gatting at Test level.

He’ll have to hope England don’t see things that way, otherwise he’s going to have to thumb for a lift off a galaxy-hopping space whale.