'When it's your day, make it special': The making of Brendon McCullum, fearless leader of England's Ashes assault - rowdy pupil suspended for partying, his personal motivation for revenge on Australia and how he's even improving Joe Root

Meandering through the hills of the working sheep farm that leads to Hobbiton, tour guides ask the Lord of the Rings aficionados that fill their buses to consider the most memorable quote from the world of JRR Tolkien.

They say the most common answer from those to have parted with £50 to disembark and walk through this pastoral paradise is from The Hobbit, when Bilbo Baggins enthusiastically hurtles over the hedges of the Shire, exclaiming: ‘I’m going on an adventure.’

Words from a fictional character that might just have easily tumbled out of the mouth of one of Matamata’s real-life residents, Brendon McCullum, when he took up the challenge of becoming England coach three and a half years ago.

Film-maker Peter Jackson scoured multiple plots across his native New Zealand before plumping for the idyllic 1,250 acres to construct his movie set. McCullum’s decision to set up home on the other side of this soporific Waikato town was down to his love of horses.

It wakes each morning to tourist chatter and the clip-clop of hooves. Spending just a few hours in the great outdoors here explains why McCullum insisted on a work-life balance upon agreeing to his expeditionary exploits with England’s Test team in the spring of 2022.

But you must venture to the other end of New Zealand, to its South Island, to the start of McCullum’s journey in cricket, to understand how his attitude towards the game - and the blueprint for tackling Australia in five Ashes Tests over the next seven weeks - developed.

A cricketer’s characteristics are shaped during their formative years. The reflexes of the peerless Sir Don Bradman were honed hitting a golf ball with a stump against a water tank. India fast bowler Jasprit Bumrah owes his stunted run-up to the limited space of the family backyard in which he practised. And McCullum’s desire to make the most of every opportunity stems from the environment in which he grew up. 

Dunedin’s weather, with its moderate summer temperatures and much higher rainfall than the country’s northerly cities, rendered playing time precious.

Every moment counts when you’re not sure when the next will present itself, be it impromptu knock-ups with brother Nathan - another Black Caps cricketer, of 147 internationals - outside their childhood home in Waterloo Street, wind whipping off Dunedin’s surf haven St Clair Beach; on the boundary of Albion, the oldest cricket club in Australasia, while watching his father Stuart; or during his own rise through Otago’s junior sides into the New Zealand system.

It is an attitude that has stuck. When it’s your day, make it special, is a motto filed in the Bazball playbook. And the urgency to move the game forward that has been a hallmark of McCullum’s cricket, both as a player and coach, is now part of the England team’s DNA: back yourself unequivocally, put pressure on the opposition at every opportunity, chase every ball to the boundary as if the world depends upon it.

What initially made a young McCullum stand out to its director Dayle Hadlee, when he was inducted into New Zealand’s academy at the turn of the 21st century, was his ‘very fast eyes’.

Hadlee, brother of the great Sir Richard, tells Daily Mail Sport: ‘We had an optometrist fly down from Auckland to test the eye speed of our squad and Brendon came out as one of the best ones there.

‘Being a wicketkeeper, you’re in the game every ball and you see all the angles, you’re seeing what the batsman's doing, what the bowlers are doing, so that's beneficial for your all-round game.

‘There were times, especially in his batting, that he would just take the bowlers on. He had no fear. And thank goodness for helmets, because he was doing all sorts of ramp shots over his head. I always thought he was ahead of his time.’

But it was for his un-Kiwi vision that McCullum would truly make his mark on not only his own country’s cricket, but that of the global game.

‘Brendon has always been a little bit left-field in the sense that he's a bit of a gambler. He works on his intuitions,’ Hadlee continues.

Like their British counterparts, Kiwis tend to be conservative by nature. Which is perhaps why it took until McCullum was in his 30s - with a CV punctuated with brilliance such as his 158 on the Indian Premier League’s opening night in 2008 - for them to appoint a maverick.

McCullum has always been a man who plays hard on and off the field, moving out of the family house just after his 18th birthday. Captain of Kings High School’s cricket and rugby teams at the time, he was suspended for holding parties, hiring out halls and DJs, and selling tickets to fellow students.

He is not one to sidestep controversy. When he became New Zealand’s 28th Test captain, replacing the deposed Ross Taylor for the tour of South Africa in late 2012, he did so amid accusations of mutiny.

With Taylor refusing to tour after allegedly rejecting an offer from coach Mike Hesson to split the captaincy on red and white-ball lines, the regime began disastrously when the South Africans bowled them out for just 45 in Cape Town.

‘We were having a quiet one after the game in his room and were watching the highlights,’ recalls Bob Carter, who retired in August after 21 years' coaching with New Zealand.

‘The camera panned on to me. Of course, no one knew who I was: Bob Carter, assistant coach. Brendon said: "What were you thinking when that camera was on you for all that time?"

‘I didn't like to say that I was actually thinking: "Why did our captain win the toss and bat?" But it was a very poignant time, because it was the line-in-the-sand moment. Brendon has this thing where he always sees what the road is ahead. Yes, it was a difficult period, of course, but he knew what he was trying to do.

‘He wanted people to go with him, and I can't ever really remember him, when he was captain, thinking about himself. I'll give an example. If he got to 99, and that next ball was there to be hit for six, he’d try to hit it for six, not one. It takes a particular person to think that way.’

Some of his pre-captaincy qualities now shone brighter, according to team sources. McCullum had always made a point of seeking out team-mates left out of the XI for a bite to eat on the evening before a match to make sure they were OK, a habit that had won loyalty and trust amongst the ranks.

With everyone willing to follow his attacking ethos and prioritise collective needs over individual ones, he soon began moulding a national team admired and feared across all formats. 

Despite the acrimony, which included legal proceedings that were later dropped, Taylor returned to the fold. Batting together, observers reckoned, made each of them doubly determined not to get out. Under McCullum’s captaincy, Taylor averaged a world-class 49.1. New Zealand reached a first World Cup final in 2015 and lost their soft touch tag, going unbeaten in 13 home Tests.

‘He not only changed the face of how New Zealand played, he also changed how we went about things in our high performance area, because suddenly our emerging players and teams had to play like the Black Caps,’ says Carter. ‘He is the most positive person I've ever met, without any shadow of a doubt.’

McCullum has since done the same with England, albeit less formally. Ahead of the Ashes summer of 2023, he and Ben Stokes addressed the country’s county cricketers, not lecturing on them how to play, but telling them the qualities they were looking for when making international picks.

A man motivated by a challenge, McCullum made it clear that it was only the Test role that interested him when he was interviewed by England’s managing director Rob Key during the search for Chris Silverwood’s successor back in 2022. A team that had won just once in 17 matches meant a chance to make a difference; a limited-overs group who had recently become double world champions less so.

His relationship with Stokes has been key to England’s rebirth, offering a counter-point to the notion that it is opposites that attract. Both born to top-level sportsmen on New Zealand’s South Island, they even met their wives in the same way. McCullum was on 12th man duties for a one-day international in Sydney in February 2002 when a young blonde in the crowd, Ellissa Arthur, caught his eye. Fast forward eight years and Clare Ratcliffe began interacting with Stokes from the stands at Old Trafford during a county match between Lancashire and Durham she was attending with her late father Arthur.

In his 2016 autobiography Firestarter, Stokes expressed his admiration for McCullum’s ethos during an extraordinary match that England had won at Lord’s the previous year. Stokes walked to the crease at 30 for four, ringed by catchers. Gauntlet accepted, he struck 92, sandwiching New Zealand’s 523 with a second-innings hundred. A thrilling conclusion was witnessed by a full house after the MCC opened the gates for free.

McCullum’s attitude struck a chord with the British public too, particularly his outlawing of sledging, although he would later admit regrets over running out Muttiah Muralitharan while he was celebrating his partner Kumar Sangakkara’s hundred in Christchurch in 2006. The ball was not dead, so it was within the laws, but not necessarily the spirit, of the game.

His influence on England as coach has been more psychological than technical. ‘You won’t see me on the tools,’ he said, when he was appointed.

Even someone as seasoned as Joe Root, a player who hit hundreds of balls to prepare in his younger days, has bought into a stripped-back philosophy, with greater emphasis on visualisation.

‘I used to want to make sure that everything felt lined up and my feet were in the right place, my head was in the right place,' Root tells Daily Mail Sport. 'But now I'm a little bit more concerned about how I'm looking at the game, how I'm going to approach different situations, whether that be the surface, different bowler types, different angles, being able to manage those different angles when they come wide of the crease, things like that.

‘Brendon's been brilliant in terms of unlocking that within me. It’s happened quite organically, but he’s opened my mind up to look at the game slightly differently and I think he's really benefitted the way that I've been playing. I’ve not always felt technically as sound as other points within my playing career, but I’ve managed it better. And it’s quite nice knowing that I don’t have to feel a million bucks to get runs.’

Root has averaged 58 in 41 Tests under McCullum, with 14 hundreds - a significant improvement on his 49.19 mark prior to the Kiwi's arrival.

Missing for Root is that elusive Ashes hundred Down Under, of course. Other than Test cricket’s fastest century - off 54 balls in Christchurch in his final red-ball match - success against the Australians evaded McCullum too, winning one of 16 Tests, and out for nought in the 2015 World Cup final.

But McCullum has made England successful - winning 25 of 41 Test matches - because he has made it OK to fail.

Ironically, McCullum believes not accepting that mantra is holding his own son Riley back. If Riley, a left-handed batter who stands 6ft tall, stops caring too much, the 21-year-old Auckland University student who plays for Northern Districts A will make it to provincial level.

McCullum's attitude towards cricket mirrors that of his horse racing business. Some antipodean stables, particularly in Australia, look to run two-year-olds, whereas his tactic with trainer Graham Richardson, who also happens to be his next-door neighbour, is to allow their fillies time, developing them until they are three or four. With this England team, he has gone with the ethos that one extra game is better than one too few.

Time is now upon us to see if the attitude of this intrepid adventurer can pay the biggest dividend of all.