Harry Brook has England’s best bat and is still earning back its trust

Harry Brook

Photo: Political Graveyard from Ann Arbor, MI / CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	1848 Keighley, England
Occupation	Painter
Awards	ICC Men's T20 World Cup winner · ICC Men's Player of the Month · PCA Player of the Year

When Ben Stokes walked away from the England Test captaincy, he did not hedge about who should come next. He said he would put his full support behind Harry Brook, the vice-captain who already ran the white-ball side. Before the summer was out the job had gone to Joe Root, a man who had resigned from it once already. Brook said the selectors were right. Asked whether a night outside a Wellington nightclub had cost him the chance, he said: “I honestly don’t know.”

That shrug is the open question about him. Nobody in English cricket doubts the batting, which arrives at a speed that used to belong to one-day hitters. What England are still weighing is whether the man holding the bat can be trusted with the dressing room, and Brook has framed it in exactly those terms himself.

The Brooks were a cricket family in Burley-in-Wharfedale long before their son became the story, with three generations turning out for the village club. Harry Cherrington Brook arrived on 22 February 1999 in nearby Keighley and moved to Sedbergh, the Cumbrian boarding school, at 14, where the coach Martin Speight shaped his game. He was still a schoolboy when Yorkshire handed him a first-class debut against Pakistan A at Headingley in June 2016.

England made him captain of the under-19 side at the 2018 World Cup, where an unbeaten 102 against Bangladesh made him only the second England captain after Alastair Cook to score a hundred at that tournament. The breakthrough came abroad, in the Pakistan Super League in 2022, when he walked in for Lahore Qalandars at 12 for 3 and made 102 not out from 49 balls, the youngest century the competition had seen.

England moved quickly: a Test debut against South Africa at The Oval that September, then a winner’s medal from the T20 World Cup in Australia. Then came the run that made his name: three hundreds on his first Test tour of Pakistan, starting with 153 at Rawalpindi, and 186 at the Basin Reserve in February 2023, where he and Root turned 21 for 3 into a stand of 302. After nine Test innings he had 809 runs, more than anyone in the history of the format at that stage. The ICC twice named him its Player of the Month in that stretch.

Multan, in October 2024, produced the number that will follow him around: 317, the first Test triple century by an Englishman since Graham Gooch’s 333 in 1990, built inside a 454-run partnership with Root as England declared on 823 for 7. By December he had overtaken Root at the top of the ICC Test batting rankings. In April 2025 England gave him the one-day and T20 captaincy in succession to Jos Buttler, and that September made him Stokes’s Test vice-captain for the Ashes, at Ollie Pope’s expense. In between, India saw his range: 158 at Edgbaston, then 111 from 98 balls in the final-Test chase at The Oval.

The case against him has two strands. The first is cricketing. England lost the 2025-26 Ashes 4-1, and Brook admitted to “bad errors” in the two opening defeats before a stand of 154 with Root at Sydney came too late to change the series. The second is conduct. On the eve of the last one-day international in New Zealand, weeks before the Ashes, he was refused entry to a Wellington nightclub and struck by a bouncer. The story surfaced only after the tour. The ECB fined him the maximum £30,000 and issued a final warning, and Brook then admitted that his first account, that he had been alone, was false: Jacob Bethell and Josh Tongue had been with him, and he had lied to protect them. The Cricket Regulator later cautioned both Brook and Bethell. Months earlier, he had pulled out of the IPL at the last minute to concentrate on England, a choice that reportedly earned him a two-year ban from the league.

“It’s not acceptable as a player, but as a captain it’s really not acceptable to do what I did in New Zealand,” he said when he faced the press in Colombo, adding that he had “a little bit of work to do to try and regain the trust of the players”. He kept the white-ball captaincy. Plenty inside the game thought him fortunate.

The T20 World Cup gave the best argument for keeping him. Against Pakistan at Pallekele on 24 February 2026 he made 100 from 51 balls to steer a tricky chase and take England into the semi-finals, becoming the first captain to score a hundred in the tournament’s history. Nine days later India set 254 at the Wankhede Stadium and England finished seven runs short.

The summer settled the Test question, for now. Stokes, dropped for the second Test against New Zealand after a separate off-field incident following the win at Lord’s, retired from international cricket before the series was out and backed Brook in public. Brendon McCullum, the coach Brook had played under for his entire Test career, declined to endorse him, and Michael Vaughan put the worry bluntly on the BBC: “I can’t have Harry Brook and Baz McCullum together in Test matches.” By the end of July McCullum had lost the Test job to Stephen Fleming, while staying on with the white-ball teams, and Root was captain again.

Brook’s reply has been to say the right things and keep scoring. “The decision to make Rooty captain is the right one,” he said before the Pakistan series, conceding that the episode had “made me realise how big it is to be England captain”. England swept Pakistan 3-0 in a series in which nobody on either side reached three figures, and Brook came closest, with 91 at Headingley. In coloured clothing he has been looser, most recently with an unbeaten 114 from 49 against Sri Lanka at Southampton in September, his hundred arriving in 42 balls.

The winter tests both roles at once. England’s tour of South Africa opens with a Test at the Wanderers on 17 December under Root, and is followed by three one-day internationals in Paarl and Bloemfontein in January that are Brook’s to lead. Root is expected to keep the Test captaincy through to the next home Ashes in 2027. Brook will be 28 by then, with the runs already banked. What he still has to prove is the thing he named himself after Wellington, and it does not show up in a scorecard.

Tags: sports, athletes, England cricket team, Harry Brook, Jos Buttler, Ben Stokes

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