Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum will 'work together in a slightly different way'

There had been suggestions that Stokes and McCullum were not aligned during England's 4-1 Ashes defeat in Australia, but the skipper trusts in the duo's ability to work together.

Stokes and McCullum were retained in their positions after the big loss Down Under following a review by the ECB, the pair having contracts until the 2027 home Ashes.

Speaking to ECB media, Stokes said: "I'm very confident in mine and Brendon's ability to be able to work together - because we've done it for such a long period of time now - but work together in a slightly different way.

"The main point of me and Brendon is our alignment towards winning things and making this team as good as they can be. That's always been the thing since we started.

"It might just look a little bit different now to how that operates, on the back of four years working together.

"But we still want to win everything, and we still want to give the guys the best chance that they possibly can of being as good as they can be."

Stokes did though add that he and McCullum did not see eye to eye on everything, which is completely normal in a captain-coach working dynamic.

"As similar as me and Brendon are, we're also dissimilar in other areas as well," Stokes said. "But the thing we both want is to be as successful as we possibly can.

"How we get to being successful might be the same here, but slightly differs here - but we will always be able to end up in the same place by having these discussions.

"We agree 95 per cent of the time on things, but those 5 per cent things that we might have different views on, we talk about it between each other and then we end up getting to the place where we both feel that we want to get to.

"Agreeing on every single thing, that's just impossible. Saying that we weren't aligned, I think is a massive overstatement."