McCullum backs England's team ethic to bounce back from chastening loss
Head coach says Ashes is ‘marathon, not sprint’ after crushing collapse inside two days at Perth
ESPNcricinfo staff22-Nov-2025
Ollie Pope looks on in vain as Australia pile on the runs•Getty Images
Brendon McCullum, England’s head coach, said that his beaten players would double down on their team unity after a chastening loss in the first Test at Perth, and vowed to block out the outside noise after what he acknowledged was “a very bad day”.Speaking to TNT Sports after Travis Head’s 69-ball century had condemned England to a crushing eight-wicket defeat inside two days, McCullum revealed he had been confident of his team’s chances of defending a slender total of 205, on a pitch that had offered pace and movement throughout, and on which Australia had been rolled aside for 132 in their first innings.Instead, Head came out swinging as a stand-in opener for the injured Usman Khawaja, and succeeded in knocking England off the aggressive lengths that had worked so well for their five-pronged pace attack on the opening day.”I thought 200 was actually a pretty good score for us to try and defend in the last innings,” McCullum said. “But the way Travis Head played was absolutely outstanding. It’s one of the best knocks I’ve seen in a pressure situation on a tough wicket.”I spoke to Gilly [former Australia wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist] about five minutes before their last innings, and he said, ‘I think you guys have got 30 too many’. I said, ‘I hope so’, but we might have needed another 230 the way that Travis played.”Fair play. We’ve always said that if someone’s able to stand up to what we throw at them, and be able to put us under pressure and deliver a performance such as that, then you have to tip your cap.”Head had been trapped on the back foot throughout a tentative first innings, scoring 21 from 35 balls from No. 5, before falling to a loose pull to mid-on off Ben Stokes. This time, however, he took the offensive option with 16 fours and four sixes, and grew in aggression throughout a first-wicket stand of 75 with the debutant Jake Weatherald, before adding 117 more with Marnus Labuschagne.With doubts about Khawaja’s fitness after a back spasm, and with Australia’s top-order in a state of flux coming into the series, Head may have made the role his own for the rest of the series – just as he did in powering Australia to ODI World Cup glory two years ago.”We will look at how we can control things better if that confronts us again,” McCullum said. “But at the same time, you’ve got to just acknowledge how special that knock was, particularly out of batting position as well. I thought was a brave call from the Australian coaches and from Travis Head as well, to put himself up the order.”Ironically, despite the extent of England’s own batting failings at Perth, with all 20 of their wickets falling in just 67.3 overs across the two days, Head’s success has encouraged McCullum to double down on their own policy of going hard at Australia’s bowlers.”Clearly, they wanted to try and make that ball as soft as what they could, as quickly as they could,” he said. “You do that through two ways. Right? You either do it through absorbing pressure and letting them all go through to the keeper, or you try and do what Travis he did, and batter it to all parts and make teams go away from their lengths. And he was superb.”As everyone knows, that’s the style of play that we try and replicate as well, to try and put opposition teams under pressure and take them away from bowling the most dangerous length. It doesn’t always work. And there were times today, with bat in hand, where we tried to do that, and it didn’t work. But the way that Travis Head played, he took the game away from us.”Case in point was the performance of Scott Boland, who bounced back from his rough first-innings figures of 10-0-62-0 to deliver the decisive spell of the day, immediately after lunch, as England lost 4 for 11 in 19 balls. Both of their set batters, Ben Duckett and Ollie Pope fell in consecutive overs after getting bogged down by Boland’s accuracy, and when Harry Brook and Joe Root tried to take the aggressive option before they had the measure of the conditions, they too both fell cheaply.Related
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“Boland bowled exceptionally well,” McCullum said. “He hit the deck hard, his paces were up as well, particularly after I felt we were on top of him a little bit in the first innings. The way he came back was a really pivotal moment. We were 100 in front, one-down, there was a time for us to be able to try and manoeuvre the game more into our favour and start to build the lead.”But in the end, we got out. We nicked out a couple of wider balls, and some of our high-quality players, who are free-wheeling types of cricketers, weren’t quite able to put pressure back on the opposition. We found ourselves in a bit of a collapse, and that’s something we’ll have to look at.”But I never want us to go away from our style. That is our best opportunity to try and put opposition teams under pressure. Yes, there’s times where we have to throttle down, and times where we can power up, but the basic principle of how we try and operate as a team is to try and exert some pressure back on the opposition.”The magnitude and manner of the defeat means that the reaction in the local media, and from the fans – both English and Australian – is likely to be off the scale in the coming days, especially given some of the headlines that contributed to the pre-series phoney war.McCullum, however, backed the culture of the dressing-room to withstand the worst of the criticism, much as has been the case throughout the ups and downs of his three-and-a-half-year tenure.”We’ve been trying to insulate against reacting to things too much for a little while,” he said. “We know that this one’s going to hurt, and it’s going to hurt not just us, but all the English people that follow this cricket team as well.”There’ll be a lot of a lot of chatter. For us, it’s a matter of making sure that we don’t allow our confidence and our camaraderie to dip too low. We know that at our best, we’re a very good cricket team. We have now got an extended amount of time off over the next 10 to 12 days to make sure that when we get to Brisbane, we bounce back.”One of my big beliefs is you got to build that unity, that cohesion, the connectivity and that camaraderie within a team for when you are under the biggest pressure, and the brightest lights, and things haven’t worked out accordingly. To me, there is no other way other than to stay together, and keep backing one another, and keep heading towards the target.”This is a marathon, not a sprint. We’ve had a very bad day today, but we’ve done it before. That’s our blueprint. We’re married to that, and we won’t back down from that over the next four Tests.”