Behind the scenes of Bazball, England’s Ashes game changer

What is Bazball and why is it a thing? How did it evolve?

Success, as they say, has many fathers. In this case, England’s bold new approach to Test cricket was born out of some years of mediocrity and worse by the team then led by Joe Root, the appointment of Ben Stokes as captain, and the decision of England performance boss Rob Key to choose Brendon McCullum as Stokes’ coaching offsider.

“Bazball”, the term first coined by ESPNcricinfo’s Andrew Miller, embodied the fact that England were playing with the sort of verve McCullum (whose middle name is Barry, hence the nickname “Baz”) demonstrated in his final years as an international cricketer. In 2016 McCullum had clubbed the fastest-ever Test hundred against Australia in Christchurch - and taken from the philosophy he articulated later that same year in his MCC Cowdrey Lecture at Lord’s.

McCullum spoke of playing the game without fear or inhibition about the possible consequences of failure. That attitude had stemmed, he said, from the traumatic days after Phillip Hughes’ death in 2014, when New Zealand were in the middle of a Test match against Pakistan.

“It was so strange, and yet it felt so right, that after Phil’s death we didn’t really care any more about the result,” McCullum had said. “Because nothing we could or couldn’t do on the field really mattered in comparison to what had happened to Phil. Our perspective changed completely for the rest of my time playing Test cricket for New Zealand, and we were a much better side as a result.”

England are now playing with that very freedom, which brings us to another thread. In white-ball cricket, led by former captain Eoin Morgan, England had broken their self-imposed shackles as early as 2015, leading to a fearless ODI and Twenty20 combination that now hold the World Cups in both formats.

A deep well of white-ball talent, particularly with the bat, was particularly open to trying that kind of approach in Tests.

Is it a state of mind or a style of play?

Essentially, Bazball is both. England are trying to win matches as quickly as possible, completely unconcerned by how it might look if that attempt goes wrong. James Anderson, England’s all-time leading wicket-taker, has had the best year of his life in Test cricket (45 wickets at 17.62). He’ll turn 41 during the fifth Ashes Test. He explained the combination of mindset and tactics at play:

“When I came back into the team it was more about trying to push your boundaries as a player - go into practice thinking, ‘How far can I push myself?’. That’s been particularly evident in the batters, they’ve tried so many different things to really impose themselves on the opposition, and certainly for the young guys that freedom to go and express themselves has worked an absolute treat.

“The same thing has happened with the bowlers. It’s only a slight shift, and it might sound strange, but they only want to think about taking 20 wickets. In the past, my job might have been, ‘Right let’s keep the run rate under 2.5 an over for the next hour’, so my job would then be not necessarily defensive, but I’d have a fairly orthodox field, I’d just try to be relentlessly accurate for a period of time. Now there isn’t that sort of feeling.

“The run rate is irrelevant to Ben in particular. He’s like, ‘I don’t care how many runs you go for, I want 20 wickets as quickly as possible’. You’re constantly thinking as a bowler then, about ‘How am I taking my next wicket’. We’ve been setting, not necessarily strange fields, but fields we’ve not necessarily set in the past, or I certainly wouldn’t have, and looking for that attacking option.”

England wicketkeeper Jonny Bairstow is a key figure in the Bazball revolution.Credit: Artwork: Matt Davidson

All this is aided by another strand of the Bazball picture. In the Twenty20 age, so the thinking goes, the experience of Test cricket has to be fun for the players. One manifestation of this is the amount of golf they are playing. Another is the fact that England have created an environment in which there is far less trepidation - Moeen Ali’s acceptance of a call out of retirement, after struggling with the mental and physical weight of Test cricket before his 2021 exit, is the latest example.

How has it changed Test cricket?

The most obvious manifestation of Bazball is in England’s phenomenally fast scoring over the past year - near enough to five runs an over when remarkably few teams over nearly 150 years of Test cricket have accumulated their runs at better than three an over. For example, the great West Indies side scored at 3.5 an over in 1984, its fastest year of scoring. In the early 2000s, Steve Waugh’s dominant Australians upped the tempo, but with far more orthodox methods than England have been using.

They have been led by a combination of experience and youth. Jonny Bairstow was the initial flag bearer, peeling off a series of centuries in England last summer that demonstrated total commitment and clarity about going on the attack - regardless of whether opponents maintained a disciplined off stump line to him or not.

Other younger men, notably Ben Duckett and Harry Brook, have followed suit with thrilling effect. In the case of Duckett, he is opening the batting in a way few have done before when watchfulness was an opener’s modus operandi. Duckett has let just eight of 605 balls through to the wicketkeeper since he was recalled to England’s Test team. It’s white ball batting against a red one.

Jimmy Anderson is in career-best form at age 40.Credit: Artwork: Matt Davidson

But the bowling, too, has been far more proactive. Stokes and his bowlers shuffle their fields, their lengths and plans constantly, tailoring things to opponents with rare agility in an era of pre-packaged plans concocted in between sessions with coaches.

In doing so, England’s collective strike rate among bowlers has dropped from taking a wicket around every 60 balls to just over 51 balls - close to the mark set by the world leaders Australia and India.

Opening batter Ben Duckett has let just eight of 605 balls through to the wicketkeeper since he was recalled to England’s Test team.

Says Anderson: “An example of that is we’ll potentially keep four or five catchers in the slips and not have an extra cover, whereas in the past we’d be, ‘Oh we’ll put an extra cover in because it’s not doing too much, to keep the runs down a little bit’. Ben would much rather extra catchers than worrying too much about the odd four here and there. It’s amazing how we’ve changed the mindset to try to be a little bit more attacking, the economy rate has actually stayed at a reasonable level.”

Put simply, England’s Bazballers are more focused on taking 20 wickets as quickly as possible than they are with saving runs, as the table below shows.

Does Bazball work in all conditions?

Short answer? Yes, thus far. Bazball started with some victories chasing hefty fourth innings totals on good batting tracks against New Zealand and India. But Stokes and McCullum recalibrated after their first defeat against South Africa to find success on far more lively surfaces against the Proteas, where the ball seamed and swung far more prominently.

In Pakistan, without Bairstow at their disposal after he broke his leg on the golf course, England’s approach went into overdrive with even faster scoring devised to buy time to bowl the hosts out twice.

In fact, England’s Bazballers have produced three of the top 10 fastest run rates for completed innings in Test history.

And on pitches as dead as that prepared in Rawalpindi (where Australia’s bowlers more or less raised the white flag earlier during a bore draw the same year), Stokes’ cheeky plans and fields, including plenty of use of bouncers in the hope of drawing out the risky hook shot, had the Englishmen finding ways to take 20 wickets in the most inhospitable conditions possible.

If there was any kind of indicator that Bazball might eventually run out of steam, it came in New Zealand on England’s most recent tour. After marching to victory in the first of two Tests, England were narrowly beaten in the second in Wellington after the Black Caps made the most of their accumulated knowledge to not be spooked by their proactive opposition. Instead, they made as many runs as possible, scoring at their own pace, and then put England under pressure to reach a target when time had begun to become a factor. Australia’s analysts will have taken note.

What do the Australians think of Bazball?

It is hard to avoid the conclusion that Australia’s Test team have gone through quite a few emotions upon finding their vanquished 2021-22 Ashes quarry had rejuvenated themselves.

In Sri Lanka last year, there were a few sniggers and joking mentions of “Bazball” in the nets, before the term “Ronball”, a reference to head coach Andrew McDonald (aka, “Ronny”), was glimpsed on a piece of paper in the team viewing area during the Adelaide Test against the West Indies.

Ahead of the England tour, numerous members of the Australian squad were quizzed on their thoughts about a year of Bazball.

Mitchell Starc

Scott Boland

Alex Carey

Steve Smith weighed in, too, after the Australians demolished India’s batting in English conditions in the first innings of the World Test Championship at the Oval, an immediate precursor to the Ashes.

“I think it will be difficult on this kind of wicket that’s up and down and seaming around,” he said. “It’s not easy to defend, let alone come out and swing,” Smith said.

OK, so Bazball is a thing. But who the hell is the Nighthawk?

For decades, it was customary for a bowler or wicketkeeper to be sent out late in a day’s play to protect the wicket of the next incoming specialist batter. But under Bazball, that nightwatchman role is turned on its head - Stuart Broad may be sent out with a licence to slog.

The concept isn’t entirely new - in one-day games in the 1980s and 1990s, the likes of Craig McDermott and Shane Warne were sent out as a “pinch-hitter” to swing for the fences ahead of recognised batters. But it suits Broad, a provocative figure as far as Australia is concerned, down to the ground.

“We are looking at every situation we are going to find ourselves in and what the positive thing to do is,” Stokes said last year. “For example, we renamed what the nightwatchman is all about. We called it Nighthawk. That was Broady. He was going out with half an hour left to play to try to literally slog. That’s where we are at the moment, it’s awesome.”

What does Bazball mean for the Ashes? Will England have the courage to play it if they’re 4-35 on day one of the series?

If you ask Stokes, there will be no deviation whatsoever. He and McCullum are utterly committed to the new plan of attack, and to rein it in now would be to contradict the whole philosophy - after all, if you are all about ignoring the possible consequences of failure, it would be disingenuous to turn back in the midst of the biggest series of all.

“We’ll keep doing the same things we’ve done,” Stokes told Sky commentator and former England captain Nasser Hussain recently.

“There’s no point changing what we’ve done over the last year, just because we’re now coming into an Ashes series.

“Every player knows the Ashes is where everything just ramps up a little bit. But we’ll keep sticking to what we do. Me and Baz have been around enough, our senior players have been around enough to understand that and make sure those little things don’t creep in.

“I’m glad I’ve actually managed to captain 12 games before stepping into the Ashes as captain. I’ve got a lot of things to be able to look back on under pressure or different situations within games. But the Ashes is always something every English or Australian cricketer really looks forward to.”

In other words, buckle up.

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