Finally dawning on McCullum that his side need to act smarter

Just before England settled down to a few days of shooting fish in a barrel at Trent Bridge against a Zimbabwe team who would struggle to win the Lancashire League, head coach Brendon McCullum gave his players a lesson in rhetoric. “We have got to be a bit smarter with some of our comments,” he said. Otherwise, there was a risk that the team would “lose touch with the English people”. This is an echo of remarks made last March by the director of cricket Rob Key recently that the players need to “stop talking rubbish”.

And, indeed, they have been prone to talk rubbish. Mark Wood has admitted that the players can be “a bit dumb”. Perhaps the worst example was Ben Duckett’s baffling claim just before the Champions Trophy that England losing 3-0 in the preceding series in India did not matter if they went on to win the tournament, which they promptly didn’t. Harry Brook can also be relied upon to say it is all going swimmingly when they are eight down for 120.

The England team’s unwarranted positive messages remind me of a story told by the former Tory MP Nicholas Soames about campaigning in Sussex. He knocked on a man’s door to be greeted with the tirade: “If you were the last man standing in politics Soames, I’d tear up my ballot paper and leave the country.” Soames pondered for a moment and replied: “I’ll put you down as a don’t know.”

So McCullum is diagnosing a real problem, and he is also touching on a profound point with his fear that the team lack a connection with the public. Some teams create an umbilical connection to their fans. Liverpool under Jürgen Klopp, the Manchester United of Scholes, Giggs, Beckham and the Nevilles, Unai Emery’s Aston Villa, the Australian side of Warne and McGrath, the past West Indies teams thrashing England at The Oval. Gareth Southgate created such a connection between his team and the England fans that James Graham wrote a play about him. It is hard to imagine anyone troubling the National Theatre with a whimsically reflective play about Bazball.

England remain a team who are strangely hard to love, even when they are exciting and full of adventure. They do always seem cold and a bit sure of themselves. McCullum is wrong, though, in where he lays the blame. Duckett, Brook and Wood can be a bit dumb, but they are only the messengers. When the players talk rubbish they are only mimicking the management rubbish they hear. For example, we have heard too often that this England team just want to entertain, so it was good to hear McCullum say that he wants to forge a connection with the public by winning. This is sport, not vaudeville.