In the manner of his exit from the role of England’s Test coach, brand McCullum trumped brand ECB.

Brendon McCullum’s sacking as mentor of the Test team, meaning neither he nor Ben Stokes will be part of the Ashes tour next year, was meant to be kept quiet in the UK until towards the end of the inaugural women’s Test at Lord’s.

But upon reaching the conclusion that he was going to be fired as Test coach but stay on with the white-ball team, amid discussions with the ECB that had stretched through a Twenty20 international series against India, McCullum had eyes on the next port of call for his brand.

Logically, that included commentary, and where else would he commentate but in Australia this summer, as New Zealand take on Pat Cummins’ team over four Tests? You can expect Baz to be holding a microphone come the Perth Test in December, not long after a white-ball series between Australia and England.

Those inquiries go some way towards explaining how the story was broken not out of England, but here by the industrious reporter Tom Morris, across SEN Radio and Seven.

A couple of hours later, the ECB confirmed the news, with the England women’s team sliding towards defeat against India. The announcement did not go down well with many of those at Lord’s.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” commentator Alex Hartley said on the BBC. “Wait ’til Tuesday. This game is done in the fact that England aren’t going to win this Test match, but there’s a Test match to save. It’s historic. It’s a historic moment within itself.

“If you say you respect the game and you want the game to improve, then don’t just pay it lip service; actually prove it and say, ‘We’ll hang on to this news until Tuesday morning, or 7pm on Monday’.”

The episode recalls one of the most telling McCullum anecdotes that emerged during his four-year tenure in charge of England. Those years gave birth to the term “Bazball”, brought about an enormous amount of clickable content for cricket and ended in a spectacular car crash that has now swallowed up Stokes, McCullum but not yet team director Rob Key.

McCullum’s course had been set years before, however, as recalled by the former New Zealand coach Andy Moles. An Englishman, Moles had implored a young McCullum to rein in his hyper-aggressive game in the early overs, to set a better example for others. This was the response: “Sorry about what the team needs. I’m building a brand, and it’s called brand McCullum. This is how I play.”

That, ultimately, is the legacy of Bazball. Like McCullum’s own career, it looked great when it worked. There were some days when the impossible was achieved, and others where even defeats were glorious.

But the other parallel with McCullum’s career is that it did not ultimately lead to the kinds of results that would have marked him down as a great player, or England a great team. On the biggest stages, against Australia and India, England fell short of series wins.

One of the enduring truths of the period was that while England swung between the extremes of COVID bubbles and biosecurity restrictions to the freewheeling on and off-field environment created by McCullum and Stokes, other sides were able to adapt their own set-ups without anything like the same dramatic peaks and troughs.

Justin Langer’s three and a half years in charge of Australia came to an end in early 2022, as senior players wanted something lighter in touch, with less volatility.

New Zealand, with showpiece Test series wins in India and England over that time, has long struck a fine balance between doughty cricket and sensible man management.

And that’s without mentioning how the Proteas managed to win last year’s World Test Championship while battling mass player defections to county and franchise cricket, plus the many political complexities of South Africa.

For none of those cases has it been necessary to run the ship to the extremes of relaxation enjoyed by England’s Test players from 2022 to 2025, culminating in a tour of New Zealand and Australia that raised countless issues around a drinking culture, nightclub bouncers and public inebriation. Those troubles were exacerbated by the fact that England lost the Ashes 4-1, having never recovered from a heedless collapse on day two of the opening Test in Perth.

That catalogue of misadventure led to the curfew and drinking policy drafted up by the ECB in recent weeks that sounds more like guidelines for a high school trip than the blueprint for a sustainable, successful professional cricket team. It was certainly not deemed sustainable by Stokes, who made a snap retirement three Test matches after the Ashes failure. If he does make a comeback next year, it will be to a very different side.

As it is, whoever replaces McCullum is going to have the difficult task of cleaning up after him. Key has somehow managed to survive the cull, in part perhaps because by sacking him, ECB chief executive Richard Gould and chair Richard Thompson would open themselves up to further scrutiny.

But there cannot be much confidence among the ECB’s list of suitors that they will be entering a sensible, balanced and clear-thinking regime. Instead the governing body has come to resemble nothing so much as a slightly chaotic ad agency, full of avenues down which to sell the game, but running out of ways to actually play it. Thompson, incidentally, is an ad man himself - chairman of the Chair of M&C Saatchi UK Group. His brand now needs serious reinvention.

Bazball, then, did plenty for brand McCullum. It also had its days in the sun for England, but only up to a point.

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Daniel Brettig is The Age's chief cricket writer and the author of several books on cricket.Connect via X.