Brendon McCullum has backed Ben Stokes to bounce back from a disappointing tour of Pakistan, admitting the England captain is “hurting” after he returned from a hamstring injury that kept him out of the team’s one victory for their two subsequent defeats, but that he also benefits from being “a tough bugger”.
Stokes averaged just 13.25 with the bat across his four innings, and bowled 10 overs without taking a wicket, in a series that proved both an individual and collective disappointment. “We all know how competitive and driven the skipper is. He’ll be hurting right now [and] it’s my job to make sure I’m there to support him,” said McCullum, the England head coach.
“Look, that injury was quite a significant injury. He had to work incredibly hard to get back. As the driven athlete he is, he’s all in when he does something. He had to put in a lot of graft and subconsciously it can … not cloud things, but maybe you’re not quite as screwed down as you can be in terms of decision making. He’s disappointed but he’s our skipper and we know he’s a tough bugger. He’ll make sure he’ll come back and it’s our job to make sure we wrap our arms around him and help him along the way.”
McCullum said England’s defeat had been down to a lack of a killer instinct, insisting his team put themselves in positions to win both of the last two Tests. “We had our chances,” he said. “Many times in the last two Tests you would argue we were in front of the game and we let that slip. We weren’t able to sustain pressure and transfer pressure back on to them. When Pakistan got a sniff they were very good, and we weren’t able to handle that.
“The last couple of years we’ve had 10 Tests in the sub-continent, we’ve won five and lost five [England have played 11, won five and lost six]. On balance that’s OK but if we’re being honest with ourselves we’ve had opportunities to put up a better record than that, so it’s disappointing. You don’t get too many opportunities to nail down big series in the sub-continent. We’ve had those chances and we weren’t quite good enough.”
But McCullum accepted that “in the end they were much better than us in these conditions”. In particular Noman Ali and Sajid Khan, who took 39 of the 40 English wickets in the last two games – “a couple of wily old customers who knew what they were doing” – had exposed a weakness against spin, described by Nasser Hussain on Saturday as “kryptonite to Bazball”.
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“I know we don’t come back to the sub-continent for a couple of years, but there’s still times even in other countries when we’re presented with spinning wickets and we’ve got to make sure our approach is a little bit more screwed down, a bit better than it is,” said McCullum. “With failure, sometimes it brings about a bit of deeper thought, and that’s something we’ll have to do over the next little while.”
