Rob Key admits his England regime has “mucked up on the big occasions”, but hopes they are given time to “evolve” after Ashes defeat.
A tour hyped as a legacy-defining project has descended into a familiar bout of soul-searching for the English game after slipping to three consecutive defeats in Perth, Brisbane and Adelaide.
The urn has already gone, but there are two games left to stem the bleeding, starting with the Boxing Day Test in Melbourne.
Jobs could well be on the line, with Key’s role as managing director of men’s cricket and Brendon McCullum’s position as head coach at the head of the queue.
Key accepts the team have not shown up at the biggest moments, having failed to win any of the last four five-match series against their major rivals, Australia and India.
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They have now lost to both away while twice drawing 2-2 at home.
“Clearly, we’ve mucked up on the big occasions. Whether that was the home Ashes series or whether that was last summer against India where we should have won the series, the big ones have eluded us,” he said.
“The truth is we haven’t done that well enough for a while. There’s been some brilliant moments along the way and I still feel like there’s plenty of life in this whole thing, but we have to evolve. We have to make sure that we’re doing things better. You don’t mind losing, the regret is that you’ve not played anything like your best.
“That’s my view on it but, as you know, these things are taken out of people’s hands a lot of the time. The decision really for the ECB will be whether or not they want to rip it up and start again, or whether they want to evolve and whether we’re the right people to do that.”
McCullum has already signalled his own hopes of staying on and Key, the man who appointed him in 2022 as Test coach and expanded his brief to cover all formats from the start of this year, remains firmly in his corner.
“Brendon has been a bloody good coach and is a bloody good coach,” he said.
“We’re at this point where you can have dressing rooms that fracture and they lose faith in the people around, but I don’t think that’s the case. We’ve had three games here where they’re adapting slowly, and I don’t think personally that’s because we need a fresh voice or they’re not listening.
“Sometimes the opposition is just bloody good.”
While a wider assessment of where it went wrong for England will surely follow in the new year, Key has already identified some errors.
He acknowledged the preparation period for such a big series, which included a white-ball trip to New Zealand and only one intra-squad warm-up match at a club ground, was inadequate, and hinted that additional specialist coaches could be sought after an initial clear-out of a bloated backroom set-up.
Crucially, he also suggested that too much confidence may have been shown by his selection panel.
Zak Crawley, Ollie Pope and Shoaib Bashir have all been shown significant support despite modest returns in recent times and they have yet to repay.
Crawley started the series with consecutive ducks which set a negative, Pope looks certain to be dropped for Jacob Bethell at the MCG and Bashir has yet to feature, having struggled consistently in practice.
Key added: “You start looking at some of the decisions that we’ve made and think, ‘Should we have made a change there much sooner?’.
“I don’t think that’s right to speculate on who those people are at the moment, but they’re the things that you look at.”
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