England have run out of resets to spend. The first one, after a miserable Ashes winter, lasted precisely one Test match. The second begins at Headingley on Wednesday with Joe Root back in charge, Ben Stokes out of the side, Brendon McCullum out of the game and a three-Test series against Pakistan to prove that something has actually changed.
Key takeaways
- Joe Root returns as Test captain, a job he already held from 2017 to 2022.
- Stephen Fleming is the new permanent coach but does not start properly until the winter tour of South Africa; Marcus Trescothick takes the Pakistan series as interim.
- Dan Lawrence comes into the XI in place of Stokes, who is now focused on the white-ball head coach role.
- England have lost seven and won two of their last 10 Tests — both wins on substandard pitches.
- Root is already England's most successful captain by volume: 27 Test wins.
How the first reset collapsed
It did not begin badly. England beat New Zealand at Lord's inside two days, on a surface so poor that nobody could honestly say whether the win proved anything at all. Then the old pattern reasserted itself: off-field trouble involving alcohol, careless dismissals on the field, and a badly weakened side taken apart at The Oval. Trent Bridge finished the job, and England lost a home Test series they had no business losing.
Stokes decided he had had enough — and announced it, characteristically, in the middle of a bowling spell at Nottingham, before immediately taking a wicket. McCullum was moved on. Bazball, as a named project, was over.
Bazball with a brake pedal
What replaces it is harder to predict than what it replaces. For four years everyone in world cricket knew exactly how England would play a Test match. Now the two men who defined that identity are gone, and the man taking over spent his first captaincy stint being accused of the opposite fault.
Root addressed that directly in conversation with Michael Atherton. The reference point is Lord's in 2021, when his England declined to chase 273 against New Zealand — a passage summed up by Dom Sibley blocking his way to 60 from 207 balls. Root's message: he has no intention of being remembered as a negative captain.
The essential inheritance from Bazball, in Root's own framing, was that it removed fear from the dressing room. What he wants to add is an awareness of the situation — including the understanding that a draw is occasionally the correct answer.
— The stated plan for Root's second term
That last point is the clearest break with the previous regime. In one of his earliest interviews as captain, Stokes insisted he would never play for a draw. Root is explicitly reserving the right to. It sounds minor. Over a five-day match against a disciplined attack, it is the difference between a series lost and a series survived.
The honest verdict on Bazball is that it was neither a fraud nor a sustainable system. It dragged a demoralised team out of a long slump and a suffocating pandemic period, and it did so by giving players permission to fail. It also never solved the problem of what to do when the method stopped working. Root's task is to keep the licence and lose the recklessness — to make England bat, collectively, the way he bats individually. Nobody has ever called him passive with a bat in hand; he simply knows which balls are worth the risk.
The only statistic that matters now
Winning has become unfamiliar. Since the collapse against New Zealand at Trent Bridge in June, England's record across their last 10 Tests reads seven defeats and two victories — and both of those wins came in low-scoring lotteries on pitches nobody would defend.
Root's own captaincy record carries a similar warning. His first spell ended with a single win in 17 matches before he stepped down in April 2022, though that stretch coincided with bio-secure bubbles, chronic unavailability and a squad running on empty. The counterweight is the full career total: 27 Test wins as captain, one clear of Michael Vaughan and three ahead of both Stokes and Sir Alastair Cook. No England captain has won more.
Root the captain, by the numbers
- 27 — Test wins as England captain, an all-time national record.
- +1 — ahead of Michael Vaughan; +3 ahead of Stokes and Cook.
- 2017–2022 — his first tenure, ended by choice in April 2022.
- 1 in 17 — wins in the closing stretch of that first spell.
- 2 in 10 — England's win rate in their most recent Tests, the number he inherits.
He is not a tactical visionary and he does not have Stokes' instinct for the improbable intervention. The short-ball plan he tried against New Zealand at The Oval while deputising this summer was a genuine misjudgement — Atherton called it brainless, and it was hard to argue. What Root does bring is a sense of proportion he says he lacked first time round: knowing which problems belong to the captain, and knowing not to flog a rare asset like Jofra Archer into the ground, a mistake he admits making before.
The other worry is his batting. The theory that captaincy will eat into England's leading run-scorer's output has been tested once already, during the most punishing period of his career, and it did not hold then. There is little reason to expect it to hold now.
Why Root, and not somebody new
The appointment was not universally admired. Mark Butcher described going back to Root as retrograde, and as a comment on English cricket's succession planning that is fair enough — a team does not usually rehire its previous captain because everything is going well.
The alternatives, though, thinned out quickly. Harry Brook's nightclub episode late last year remains recent enough to matter. Jacob Bethell has barely begun his Test career and is injured in any case. Set against that, handing the job to the most experienced, most respected and most decorated captain in the dressing room stops looking like nostalgia and starts looking like the only sensible option available.
The Stokes-shaped hole
Filling the batting slot is straightforward enough on paper. Dan Lawrence takes it against Pakistan; Sam Curran or Rehan Ahmed are plausible answers later. Filling the rest of what Stokes provided is not a selection question at all. The all-round balance he gave the side, the authority he carried, the habit of producing a match-altering hour when England were beaten — none of that transfers to a replacement name.
Even a diminished Stokes was worth more than the sum of his numbers, which is why his exit leaves England objectively weaker, whatever the new regime says publicly. The lingering suspicion — part genuine expectation, part the sport's appetite for a good story — is that he could reappear for the Ashes next summer, a series England have not won since 2015. He insists he will not. Nobody would fall over in shock if he did.
England v Pakistan — the fixtures
- First Test, Headingley — Wednesday 19 August to Sunday 23 August (first ball 11am).
- Second Test, Lord's — Thursday 27 August to Monday 31 August (first ball 11am).
- Third Test, Edgbaston — Wednesday 9 September to Sunday 13 September (first ball 11am).
A caretaker summer before the real rebuild
There is one more complication. The coach England have actually appointed is not the coach standing in the dressing room this week. Stephen Fleming does not take up the role in earnest until the South Africa tour this winter, which leaves Trescothick running the Pakistan series on an interim basis while the captain sets a new tone on his own.
That is an awkward way to launch an era, and it makes the next three weeks harder to read. A good series will be credited to Root; a bad one will be blamed on the vacuum. Either way, the results count the same in the table.
The bottom line
England are not asking Root to reinvent the team. They are asking him to keep the fearlessness Bazball gave them, subtract the self-harm, and start converting good days into won matches. He has the record, the respect and the batting to do it, and he no longer has the one player who used to make the whole thing work anyway. The Ashes can wait. Headingley cannot.
