The ECB has announced it will consider between six and ten names to replace Brendon McCullum as Test head coach before England’s Pakistan series. This is, apparently, a matter of civilisational importance.
Let us be clear about what is actually happening here. England needs a cricket coach. Not a surgeon to perform emergency heart transplants on the NHS. Not a climate negotiator to reverse atmospheric collapse. Not a housing minister to solve the homelessness crisis. A cricket coach.
Yet the way this search is being framed, you would think the ECB had been tasked with selecting the next Prime Minister during a nuclear standoff. “Six to ten names.” The precision! The gravitas! One imagines Richard Gould in a war room, red telephone to his ear, weighing the geopolitical implications of each candidate as if the stability of the Western alliance depended on whether they preferred a four-slip or three-slip cordon.
This is what modern sport does to us. A coaching vacancy becomes existential theatre. A hiring decision transforms into national reckoning. The clock ticks. Deadlines loom. Someone will be disappointed, and that disappointment will be treated as though England has lost its place at the table of nations.
The reality is simpler and sadder: England won some Test matches under McCullum, then stopped winning them. Now they want someone else to win them instead. It is a normal professional decision dressed up as a constitutional crisis.
But do go on, ECB. Make it dramatic. We are watching.