Played 11, lost 10, won one.
England men’s white-ball cricket results in 2025 are enough to make a Manchester United fan wince. The Old Trafford side are struggling but not quite to this extent.
England coach Brendon McCullum and United counterpart Ruben Amorim have the same brief: turn a once great team back into that after a period of regression and inertia.
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Highlights – or lowlights, if you will – from England’s thrashing by South Africa in their final Champions Trophy match
Both men seem to have the will and perhaps the skill to do that, yet questions remain over structure and resources. For McCullum and Amorim, there may be no quick fix.
We’ll let you pore over Manchester United’s issues with this particular piece to focus on the problems McCullum has inherited and possibly created, as well as how he can go about fixing them.
Who captains England moving forward?
The New Zealander’s first job is to decide which man – or two men – he wants to captain England’s limited-overs outfit moving forward with Jos Buttler resigning form the role during an abject Champions Trophy in which the team lost all three of their matches.
For the second global 50-over event in a row, after the 2023 World Cup, England were knocked out before the knockouts. They look a shadow of their former all-conquering selves.
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Jos Buttler resigned as England white-ball captain after the group-stage exit at the Champions Trophy.
Harry Brook seems favourite to succeed Buttler but McCullum has not ruled out splitting the position across 50 and 20-over cricket after “a couple of weeks to work it out and get this back on track”.
Dual captains could, in theory, allow someone with an innate knowledge of the 50-over game like Joe Root to take England through to the next World Cup in 2027 and Brook to helm the side in T20, a format he is much more accustomed to.
In his career, Brook has played 149 T20s but just 41 List A (50-over) fixtures, such is the nature of English domestic cricket these days with the One Day Cup relegated to a development competition due to it clashing with The Hundred on the calendar.
McCullum is also considering the possibility of appointing an outsider as captain, news that may have caused the ears of Sam Billings, James Vince and Lewis Gregory to prick up with each of those men winning titles as leaders in domestic cricket.
Is James Vince in with a shout of captaining England moving forward?
That trio might have thought their international days were over, yet they could now be in the running to take over.
Never dull with Bazball, is it?
Add 50-over experience to the team?
Even if Billings, Vince and Gregory are not handed the captaincy, there is an argument that they – and possibly oft-underrated Hampshire all-rounder Liam Dawson – should be in and around the ODI squad as experienced players with knowledge of that format.
It was perhaps no surprise that the two batters to score centuries for England in the Champions Trophy – Root and Ben Duckett – have played over 200 and 90 List A matches respectively and seemed to understand the cadence of an innings.
Those bred on T20 – Brook, Phil Salt and Jamie Smith – managed a top-score of 25 between them. If they don’t play 50-over cricket, how are they going to be good at it?
The same goes for the bowlers, with many of them not used to delivering 10 overs in a white-ball game but four overs in a T20 or 20 balls in The Hundred.
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Michael Atherton described England’s innings against South Africa as ‘dreadful’ as they were skittled for 179 in 38.2 overs
The calendar is not going to change, not in the near future at least, so maybe England are better served adding a sprinkling of nous to their ODI side as well as pushing Buttler – arguably their best white-ball batter of all time – up the order now that he no longer has the rigours of captaincy to contend with.
Buttler, who has racked up 257 List A appearances, did not deviate from the No 6 spot in the Champions Trophy but rather than coming in with the platform to finish an innings in style, he often wandered to the crease with his side in crisis.
Find variety and balance
Other than naming a new skipper, or skippers, and finding the best spot for the former captain, McCullum must also add variety, with a battery of right-arm pace bowlers making the team too samey. Those seamers were toothless and targeted in the middle overs.
There was no different angle in the fast-bowling department with left-armers Sam Curran and Reece Topley overlooked and no one seemingly that adept at taking pace off the ball in the ilk of India’s Hardik Pandya and Australia’s Nathan Ellis.
India’s Hardik Pandya (right) bowls the sort of pace-off deliveries England have struggled to produce
Plus, there was only one frontline spinner in Adil Rashid – until Rehan Ahmed was belatedly called up following Brydon Carse’s injury – with part-timers Root and Liam Livingstone asked to provide support.
Compare that to India, who have the shrewd left-arm spin of Ravindra Jadeja, the quicker version in Axar Patel, the leg-spin of Varun Chakravarthy – a man who bewitched New Zealand with a five-for on Sunday – and the left-arm wrist-spin of Kuldeep Yadav.
England had one leg-spinner – a world-class one, it must be said – and nothing else.
It is incumbent on McCullum to not only find some back-up for Rashid – Rehan, Dawson, Yorkshire leg-spinner Jafer Chohan and Sussex left-armer James Coles are possibles – but also plan for beyond him, with the Yorkshireman now 37 years of age.
Adil Rashid remains a key player for England but has just turned 37
When England beat New Zealand in the 2019 World Cup final, they had six proper bowlers: Rashid, Jofra Archer, Mark Wood, Liam Plunkett – oh how they now miss his middle-over excellence right now – Chris Woakes and Ben Stokes.
In the Champions Trophy, they had four. Definitely one too few and maybe two as having six frontline bowlers gives a captain wiggle room should someone suffer an off day.
Remedying that by unearthing effective bowlers who can also contribute with the bat and not lengthen the tail too much (a recall for Curran perhaps) is something else we can add to McCullum’s bulging in-tray as he plots how to end England’s white-ball funk.
Will McCullum lose his ‘magic dust’?
We are making his job sound like a hospital pass but it isn’t. England have good players who should be doing better, even if the schedule is making it hard for them to hone their 50-over craft.
They clearly need a shot of confidence from somewhere and McCullum may be the man to provide it, having done just that with a Test team that was on its knees with one win in 17 games before he and Stokes ushered in the Bazball era in the spring of 2022.
McCullum is now head coach of England across all formats
With the Kiwi now in charge across the board, there will be alignment.
England have prioritised one format over another for years now.
Building towards the goal of winning the 2019 World Cup, white-ball cricket was king to the detriment of the Test team, while since the Ashes thrashing in 2021/22, red-ball has been the focus with Buttler often not having his best side available. No wonder results tailed off.
Now, though, McCullum can attempt to work out how to bring success across all formats – or be left spreading himself too thin.
Sky Sports Cricket’s Michael Atherton said: “I think McCullum has got his hands full. I’m not entirely sure I would have united the [coaching] roles. If things go badly, he will lose some of that magic dust. He’s got a real challenge on his hands.”
Much like Amorim up at Old Trafford, McCullum is becoming starkly aware what he has let himself in for.
