Stephen Fleming left Chennai in July, and he spent Monday driving round England’s county grounds

The man who ran Chennai Super Kings for the best part of two decades spent Monday morning on the M1. Stephen Fleming landed in England on 14 September and went straight to work, and the job he is working on is not the one England are playing this week.

Fleming takes over as England’s Test head coach, a role he was handed on 30 July. He has not coached a session in it yet. His two weeks in the country are about paperwork, introductions and the awkward business of dividing a squad with another coach who used to have all of it.

From Chepauk to Loughborough

Indian readers know Fleming’s work better than most England supporters do. He coached Chennai Super Kings from 2009 to 2015 and again from 2018, and in that time CSK won five IPL titles, in 2010, 2011, 2018, 2021 and 2023, plus two Champions League T20 titles. The franchise and the coach announced a mutual parting on 13 July this year. Seventeen days later the England job was his.

His first road trip has been unglamorous. He drove around the county circuit and stopped at the ECB Performance Centre in Loughborough, which is roughly the opposite of Chepauk in every respect that matters. He will meet Joe Root this week to pull apart the Pakistan series England won 3-0 and to start planning December’s tour of South Africa. Then he shadows Brendon McCullum in Manchester at the weekend for the third T20I against Sri Lanka, flies home, and commentates for Sky on India’s tour of New Zealand.

He missed the Pakistan series entirely. Marcus Trescothick covered the Test job as interim.

Two coaches, one set of players

England have split the head coach role in half. Fleming has the Tests. McCullum, who had both jobs, keeps the white-ball side. On paper that is a sensible response to a schedule nobody can coach alone. In practice it means two men now want the same cricketers.

Harry Brook is the obvious pressure point. He is England’s Test vice-captain and their limited-overs captain, which makes him the property of both coaches at once, and he took charge of this Sri Lanka T20I series after the selectors had discussed resting him from it.

McCullum was blunt about what the new structure costs. “The coaching structure with Flem coming in, split coaches, means we need more resources now, not less resource,” he said at the Utilita Bowl on the eve of the first T20I. “Flem and I will catch up in the coming days and we’ll start trying to piece all that together.”

The strain is not theoretical. Six of the XI who played the third Test at Edgbaston travelled to Southampton on Sunday, under 24 hours after that match finished, and the coaching staff did the same. That is the handover happening in real time: one squad, two campaigns, nobody with a spare day.

A winter with no gaps in it

Fleming’s first assignment as an England coach arrives after a white-ball winter he has no say in. England open a 50-over series against Sri Lanka on 22 September at Chester-le-Street, then a tri-series in Pakistan with Sri Lanka from 20 October, then three ODIs and five T20Is in Australia. A week after that final T20I, on 9 December, they start a tour match in Durban before three Tests in South Africa.

The new year brings three more ODIs against South Africa, two Tests in Bangladesh and the 150th Anniversary Test against Australia at the MCG in March. There is an ODI World Cup later next year, which is why McCullum has already accepted that T20Is drop down the list until 2028.

Brook plays no franchise cricket overseas and his winter is still full. His 2025-26 off-season took in New Zealand, the Ashes in Australia, then Sri Lanka and India for the T20 World Cup, October through March. Fleming and McCullum are not arguing about philosophy. They are arguing about who gets him in February.

That is the part worth watching. Root said before the Pakistan series that the Bazball blueprint would not be ripped up, so Fleming has not been brought in to rebuild England’s batting. His actual job is to run one half of a team that no longer has time to be one team. Whether it works comes down to two friends dividing a squad without either of them feeling short-changed, and that negotiation starts in Manchester this weekend.

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