DANE ELDRIDGE: Brendon McCullum is no longer England Test coach in a major blow to Pom-hating Ausssies

If there’s one trait inherent to being Australian it’s our unrestrained and unquenchable love for smashing the Poms.

While our two nations will always have a brotherhood built on sharing mutual histories and Kylie Minogue, as an Aussie nothing beats giving the English a flogging and making fun of them afterwards.

It’s a quality microchipped in us at birth and nurtured through a national curriculum of inter-generational storytelling and tropes about them dodging soap and dentists.

This has manifested most prominently in cricket, a medium where we’ve elicited unbridled joy and self-worth over the years from whipping them silly at their own game.

Even when they’ve fielded sides full of frumpy postmen, Aussie appetites for dominating England have remained so insatiable that it was almost clinically irresponsible to add a cocky Kiwi like Brendon McCullum to the mix.

So when they did, it was no surprise our hunger soared to all-new heights.

Now it’s all over, it’s a crying shame we’ll never experience the feeling again of doling out a healthy thrashing to one of McCullum’s Pom sides - because it hits all our erogenous zones.

News of McCullum’s sacking as England’s red-ball coach is being deeply mourned here at home, not out of sympathy for a fellow antipodean losing his job, but because it means we don’t get to actively rail against the scam of Bazball anymore.

For those unaware, Bazball was self-promoted by England as a concept that would revolutionise the game- and they were right.

That’s because it established the side as the first in cricket’s history who didn’t acknowledge results, nor reality.

Under the auspices of Bazball, England abandoned hundreds of years of learned behaviour by claiming it was okay to lose provided you flashed a bit of garter along the way.

Put simply, McCullum empowered his team to do whatever scratched their itch in the immediate moment, a freedom from the game’s stuffy principles so wide-ranging they didn’t have to win to be successful or even stay in their crease.

This applied off the field too, where England’s cowboy mindset extended to booze-adjacent disciplinary issues so rife that the only ‘back foot punches’ were happening in the nightclub.

But what gave Bazball its uniquely insufferable quality was its total lack of humility, with those brainwashed in to McCullum’s cult preaching along the way to anyone who’d listen about how their divine methods would save cricket and we could all thank them later.

Obviously Aussies saw Bazball from a mile off, recognising immediately it was garden variety hogwash that would be cannon fodder against our team and its old fashioned principles of discipline, patience and giving a toss about protecting our stumps.

And when their self-promotion reached noise pollution levels, it got under our bonnet so deeply we made it a national priority to ensure the concept was exposed as the complete and utter hoax it was.

And besides the odd tied series and World Cup, we did.

In the end, McCullum’s reign in Ashes cricket did little for England other than cultivate a magnificence complex and introduce an uncouth reverse sweep to Joe Root’s divine technique.

But it did plenty for Australia, and that’s why we are in national mourning over his reign finishing- because putting Bazball in its place had become one of our great joys.

Prior to its inception, we’d believed England couldn’t stoop any lower for hypocrisy and tone-deaf sanctimony after years calling us convicts in the same breath they’d order nine fielders on the leg side and bowl at our necks.

But when Bazball came along, it delivered Australian cricket a renewed purpose.

We reframed the Ashes as not just a fight for the Urn but also one against disinformation, then carried the rest of the uncorrupted cricket world on our crusade by fighting back with results and dignified run rates.

Now it’s all over, it’s a crying shame we’ll never experience the feeling again of doling out a healthy thrashing to one of McCullum’s Pom sides - because it hits all our erogenous zones.

While picking a favourite Ashes victory is like naming the best Police Academy movie, nothing matched the satisfaction of dominating England before hearing them pontificate afterwards how there’s a moral superiority in getting rolled by an innings inside four days.

But let the record show that in the end, Bazball was so irretrievably twisted that it somehow made Australia the side that delivered the moral victory, and for that act of sheer mastery, McCullum should be celebrated.