At the end of the fourth day's play at the Kia Oval, the abiding question wasn't whether England could complete a record-breaking fourth innings chase or even if they could bat the match out to secure the draw. It was why everyone is still watching an England team coached by Brendon McCullum six months after he ought to have moved on from the job.
McCullum's backstory as England coach begins on 2 January 2013 when, in his first match as New Zealand's Test captain, the team were bowled out for 45 by South Africa at Cape Town. Legend has it this was the watershed Test. In a management meeting that evening, McCullum laid out his ideas about the way the game should be played. The hard-charging, happy-go-lucky approach that has characterised England's cricket in the past four years was born right here, when, according to New Zealand's coach Mike Hesson, McCullum was first empowered "to do the job the way he wanted it done".
Missing Chapter in McCullum's Backstory
There is a chapter missing in this version. Everyone involved in New Zealand cricket knows it by rote, but it's not often discussed in England. It's all about what happened in the months running up to that match, when McCullum's predecessor as captain, Ross Taylor, was forced out of his job by Hesson, who was an old teammate of McCullum's.
The fallout was so incendiary that last time anyone asked, McCullum and Taylor were still at odds about how it went down. Both wrote about it in their memoirs. McCullum describes himself as being caught in the middle; Taylor says he felt McCullum knew what was going on all along.
Taylor writes that when McCullum suggested that they should split the captaincy between the two of them, "it was hard to know where he was coming from: maybe there was an element of him not wanting the Test captaincy and/or being able to say to the media that he'd tried to convince me to do it – by that stage they knew they had a PR problem".
In between all the he-said, she-said, what is absolutely true is that McCullum threatened to sue for defamation when he was falsely accused of orchestrating Taylor's removal. The man who made the accusation, the former Test player John Parker, apologised and retracted his remarks.
Dressing Room Politics and Legal Maneuvers
Later, when a Sunday paper obtained a series of emails between McCullum and the mental skills coach, Kerry Schwalger, from this era, McCullum's legal team secured an injunction to prevent their publication. Martin Crowe was so offended by the way Taylor was treated that he said he had burned his New Zealand team blazer.
All of which may be a timely reminder that McCullum's dressing rooms have not always been the sort of free-and-easy open-to-all environments they seem to be when the team are winning. That, expert as he is handling his players, he is also a pretty ruthless dressing-room politician, a man who knows how to instruct a media team and even deploy his lawyers during a crisis.
All of which is a long way from what's been going on at the Oval this week. This was a team full of rookies, with no spinner, two debutant wicketkeepers and an attack spearheaded by a man who had not bowled anything more than a four-over spell in six months, led by a man who does not want to be captain, while their real captain is in Chester-le-Street, working out his anger on the Northamptonshire bowling attack. They have caught poorly and batted rashly. Every one of these problems can be tracked back to the team's leadership, which, this week at least, does not include Ben Stokes.
Leadership Questions and Stokes' Absence
The talk is that Stokes will be back for the third Test at Trent Bridge next week. Sooner or later, someone is going to have to explain what has gone on between England's leadership team, why McCullum refused to give Stokes his backing as captain and what he meant by repeatedly insisting that he was worried about Stokes's mental wellbeing when, according to all reports out of Durham, there isn't anything wrong with him.
"He has been absolutely fine," said Durham's chief executive, Tim Bostock, on Thursday, "just normal Ben". Bostock said he was "bemused" by the comments.
McCullum's England tried and McCullum's England failed. They provided a lot of entertainment along the way, but six months on the charm of watching them do it all over again is starting to wear a little thin, even when you've drunk as much as the Saturday crowd at the Oval.
