Brendon McCullum sacked as England's Test head coach! Assessing Bazball's legacy, and who could replace him?

Phil, Brendon McCullum gone from the test role.

First things first, right decision, wrong decision?

Right decision on balance.

There weren't too many voices in support of him really from around mid-December onwards.

Uh, and the stench of the Ashes never really went away.

Uh, a- actually one of the leading voices [laughs], at least publicly, was Ben Stokes, funnily enough, who, who gave him the, the props before that now valedictory test match that he played.

Um, but slightly ironically, the breakdown of their relationship, or rather the, the tethering of their relationship in and around the Ashes, and I know that they were reported to have kissed and made up, but, uh, that weakened both of their hands really.

Um, and for all that it may have looked after the f- final test match that Stokes was gonna go and that was gonna be it, there was always that feeling, and, you know, I, I personally wrote about it two or three months ago, that their, their fates are interlinked, intertwined.

And it felt like he was really isolated when Stokes went.

If you lose your, um, the man who implements your ideas, if the man who carries out your philosophy just can't get it done anymore, for any number of reasons perhaps, but fundamentally if Ben Stokes still had the energy to be England captain, if he still had the will to be England captain, then he would be England captain.

But when he went, that was probably the death knell for, for McCullum.

Um, I thought there was a possibility that there might be some kind of uneasy, um, kind of, not gardening leave, but some scenario whereby he hung on for the summer because it was so dislocated anyway that they might think, "Get through to the end of the summer, see how this Pakistan series goes," um, and then make a more, uh, considered move in September.

A shake hands, to be honest, irrespective of whether they beat Pakistan or not.

Um, as it stands, they've made a decision which is pr- probably popular and quite populist as well.

Nice.

Uh, and I think on balance, um, that now look...

Extraordinary story really of, of the England test team over the last four years now reaches a deeply anticlimactic ending.

But perhaps all, all careers end in failure, um, and why should his be [laughs] any different? The ha- caveat of course is that almost accidentally he's turned the, uh, the white-ball stuff into something quite, quite interesting.

Well, he's turned the T20 stuff into something quite interesting.

I knew you'd say this.

For, for...

That's the other thing for me with the timing of this, is that, like, t- like, great thing, they're number one in the world, doesn't matter.

Like, the, the thing that matters now is ODI cricket, where they're gonna play a World Cup in at the end of next year.

And England have still been bad and in fact worse in ODI cricket, I think, under McCullum than they were in the previous years.

I know they won a series in Sri Lanka earlier this year, but apart from that.