Relaxed England setup won’t suit all, but it’s perfect for Jonny Bairstow

Across this summer Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes have made it a point of principle to back their players absolutely in public, while building a team environment that is marked most of all by absolute positivity. They will not have had any one player in mind when they came up with this approach, but they have inadvertently created the perfect circumstances for Jonny Bairstow to shine – and the results have been explosive.

He is someone who rarely looks happy on the field if he is not happy off it, someone whose confidence can sometimes be fragile. There’s one moment that really stands out from my time working with him as an England coach. It came before the third Test against Sri Lanka in Colombo in 2018, a series England won 3-0 while batting quite aggressively. Bairstow was not in the team for the first two games but was brought in for the final match, as was Stuart Broad.

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I was giving Jonny some throwdowns on the pitch when the captains came out for the toss, and Mike Atherton started his TV interview with Joe Root by saying something along the lines of England having their B team out. He was obviously referring to Broad and Bairstow both having names that start with a B, but Jonny heard it, paused, muttered something under his breath and seemed obviously unhappy. I think he took it as a suggestion that he was not a first choice, and he bristled at it. On that occasion he managed to turn that into extra motivation: he batted at three for the first time in his Test career, played brilliantly, scored a century and was named player of the match, but it illustrated how he can be