Played 11, lost 10, won one.
England men’s white-ball cricket results in 2025 are enough to make a Manchester United fan wince. The Old Trafford side are struggling but not quite to this extent.
England coach Brendon McCullum and United counterpart Ruben Amorim have the same brief: turn a once great team back into that after a period of regression and inertia.
Both men seem to have the will and perhaps the skill to do that, yet questions remain over structure and resources. For McCullum and Amorim, there may be no quick fix.
We’ll let you pore over Manchester United’s issues with this particular piece to focus on the problems McCullum has inherited and possibly created, as well as how he can go about fixing them.
Who captains England moving forward?
The New Zealander’s first job is to decide which man – or two men – he wants to captain England’s limited-overs outfit moving forward with Jos Buttler resigning form the role during an abject Champions Trophy in which the team lost all three of their matches.
For the second global 50-over event in a row, after the 2023 World Cup, England were knocked out before the knockouts. They look a shadow of their former all-conquering selves.
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Jos Buttler resigned as England white-ball captain after the group-stage exit at the Champions Trophy.
Harry Brook seems favourite to succeed Buttler but McCullum has not ruled out splitting the position across 50 and 20-over cricket after “a couple of weeks to work it out and get this back on track”.
Dual captains could, in theory, allow someone with an innate knowledge of the 50-over game like Joe Root to take England through to the next World Cup in 2027 and Brook to helm the side in T20, a format he is much more accustomed to.
In his career, Brook has played 149 T20s but just 41 List A (50-over) fixtures, such is the nature of English domestic cricket these days with the One Day Cup relegated to a development competition due to it clashing with The Hundred on the calendar.
McCullum is also considering the possibility of appointing an outsider as captain, news that may have caused the ears of Sam Billings, James Vince and Lewis Gregory to prick up with each of those men winning titles as leaders in domestic cricket.
Is James Vince in with a shout of captaining England moving forward?
That trio might have thought their international days were over, yet they could now be in the running to take over.
Never dull with Bazball, is it?
Add 50-over experience to the team?
Even if Billings, Vince and Gregory are not handed the captaincy, there is an argument that they – and possibly oft-underrated Hampshire all-rounder Liam Dawson – should be in and around the ODI squad as experienced players with knowledge of that format.
It was perhaps no surprise that the two batters to score centuries for England in the Champions Trophy – Root and Ben Duckett – have played over 200 and 90 List A matches respectively and seemed to understand the cadence of an innings.
Those bred on T20 – Brook, Phil Salt and Jamie Smith – managed a top-score of 25 between them. If they don’t play 50-over cricket, how are they going to be good at it?
The same goes for the bowlers, with many of them not used to delivering 10 overs in a white-ball game but four overs in a T20 or 20 balls in The Hundred.
