Don’t discard Bazball England

Eversince the loss of the series or more precisely, eversince Joe Root’s ill-advised ramp of Bumrah, England’s former cricketers have advised the team to look beyond Bazball. They range from Michael Vaughan to Mark Ramprakash though sane voices like Nasser Hussain have asked the supporters to refrain from criticising Bazball. I would urge England don’t ditch Bazball. It has brought them lots of successes and it is bound to bring them quite a lot in the future. England have reinvented the way the game must be played and it is better they stick to it. All these former cricketers would have praised Bazball if England had. Now that they have lost, they seem to find fault with anything and everything related to Bazball. Let me explain in don’t discard Bazball England.

The matter of fact is that Bazball has brought a lot of victories for England which otherwise they would not have. Let us remember that prior to Bazball, under Joe Root, England won just one, I repeat just one Test in 17 attempts. That is extremely poor even by the standards of the current West Indies. If only India had not repeated their manner of losing the very next Test after having won one, England would not even have won that one. It was from such dire straits, Bazball was born. Brendan McCullum and Ben Stokes have certainly returned the joy on the faces of the English supporters. Yes, they would have liked to see England win the Ashes but it wasn’t to be. The fault was either poor execution during The Ashes or a superior Australian display or a combination of both.

Michael Vaughan about Root’s ramp and Nasser Hussain about Bazball

“The batsmen, meanwhile, look like they only have one way to play. They are in fifth gear from ball one. I don’t mind some of them playing like that because they are better for it. But Joe Root should forget it. He has 10,000 Test runs playing like Joe Root. He doesn’t need to be a Bazballer. It is time for someone in the management to put an arm around Joe and say ‘please just be yourself’. I think it’s as simple as the fact that he is too wrapped up in Bazball, the whole ethos of excitement and entertainment.”

I must say that I agree with Vaughan in this case because Root is too good a batsman to try ungainly shots and thereby surrender the advantage.

Hussain writes, “This is no time to throw out Bazball, which has provided exciting cricket for the past 18 months and still has plenty of credit in the bank, despite a first series defeat for Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum.”

I couldn’t agree more

Three wins in Pakistan

Not in their wildest dreams, would England have envisaged winning a series in Pakistan. For some reason, England have always found Pakistan a difficult opponent to defeat. Be it in Pakistan or be it in England. Outside of Australia, it is Pakistan they have feared. When the Ben Stokes led team set foot in Pakistan after a 30-year hiatus, none would have expected for England to win the series easily or for that matter, even win. Stokes’s England set out of defy everything and the result was a 3-0 pounding of Pakistan. Even the bitter critic of England would have been pleasantly surprised at the turnaround. Leave alone sweeping the series, it is difficult to win the series itself in the first place.

This was possible only because of the way England batted. Bazball led the way. Nothing more nothing less. If England had played in the traditional method, Pakistan would have ran allover them. That they couldn’t was down to the aggressive approach of the batsmen. All the pitches were plain roads. It required such type of batsmanship to not only generate interest in the contest but to give more than enough time for the bowlers to pick up 20 wickets.

Derailment in India

It wasn’t because of the method that England lost the series but rather the execution. When Ben Duckett and Zak Crawley were at the crease, they kept England rollicking. It was always a flamboyant start to the innings. England won at Hyderabad because of the way Ollie Pope stuck to the tried and tested method over the last couple of years. The inability of batsmen like Root, Bairstow and Stokes himself to carry forward the starts provided by the openers, proved to be the problem. They must have avoided some of the shots that are bread and butter in England. For eg., the Roo’t ramp, he would have got away with that shot in England because the ball comes onto the bat a tad quicker. In India, by the time ball arrives, he was more than halfway through the shot and as a result, he lost his balance.

Perhaps, instead of trying to score 6-7 runs every over, they could have toned it down to 4-5 any over. It would have meant more watchful play. In England, the experience of Anderson would easily carry the day but here in India, England has picked absolute rookie spinners. One of whom was picked based on what Stokes saw on Twitter.

Wrapping up don’t ditch Bazball England

As Hussain says, Bazball has given England a lot of opportunities to cheer and cherish. This is not the time to bid it goodbye. The next examination will be at the end of 2025 in Australia. If England fail to compete in that series, still playing the same way, perhaps it is time.