Forget ‘Bazball’: Why Travis Head is the aggressive opener Australia needs now
Take broadcaster and cricket tragic Piers Morgan, who told The Weekend Australian: “The irony is Travis Head played Bazball. He just didn’t do the one shot that we kept doing. He understood that at Perth, when it’s bouncing a bit and nibbling off the seam a bit, you don’t drive four inches outside of off stump. So that’s all he didn’t do.”
What is this weird parallel universe in which we find ourselves? The parallel universe in which England have become the custodians of attacking, more-than-a-run-a-ball batting?
Bazball. Travball. They’re just new labels for old ways of playing a game that’s 450 years old. Victor Trumper was known for swinging from the get-go. We calling that Trumpball now?
We went through this last summer when teenager Sam Konstas’s cavalier approach was hailed as the antidote to boring old Test cricket. We’d never seen a half-century like it, according to the bubbleheads who’d been watching the game for six months.
Never mind the deeds of Doug Walters, David Hookes, Adam Gilchrist, Ricky Ponting and generations of swashbucklers who had taken the big stick to generations of bowlers all over the world, for years.
Head’s matchwinning 123 from 83 balls in the second dig of the first Ashes Test was brilliant and proof he should open at the Gabba when the second Test starts Thursday. But it wasn’t revolutionary, and certainly not out of the Bazball playbook – which is in desperate need of a heavy edit – as Morgan claimed.
Aggressive left-handed openers such as Matthew Hayden and David Warner regularly took matches away from the opposition within a session, smashing balls across the line and into the stands. I’ve killed more brain cells than most and I can clearly recall them doing it. Or maybe I dreamt it? No, I just checked Cricinfo and they did it.
So Australian selectors will hardly be splitting the atom if they pick Head at opener for this looming pink-ball Test, giving incumbent Usman Khawaja ample time to concentrate on his golf swing and Instagram account.
Head has said he wants the job without saying he wants the job, using a series of radio interviews last week, and then on Sunday in an all-in media conference, to suggest he’s the man for the job. He might look like the definitive knockabout – the moustache, the paunch, the speed-dealer sunglasses worn during 2023 World Cup final celebrations – but he knows what he’s doing.
He also agrees with injured captain Pat Cummins that batting orders should be as flexible as a gymnast: “That is where the game’s going, and it’s when do you use that – when’s the right time, when’s it acceptable – and we’re going to have good moments of it and we’re going to have bad moments of it. It’s ever-evolving.”
No thanks. Ask Steve Smith how that worked when he shot up the order after Warner retired. He retreated to No.4, where he’s made most of his runs, and re-established himself as the best batsman in the world. There’s been murmurs that selectors would prefer him at No.3, but that’s been shelved.
One man who hates this funky approach is Hayden, who’s calling the series for Channel 7 this year from beneath a large, black Stetson.
“I fundamentally disagree players can just bat anywhere in the order,” he told me recently. “Of course, they can bat everywhere in the order, especially guys like Head and Smith, but if you go through every player’s stats, you’ll generally see which position they have owned.”
The position Head has owned is “No.5 saviour”. He’s saved the day – and the skin of the top order – for Australia too many times to recall. Of his 10 Test centuries, eight of them have been scored while batting in the middle order.
Hopefully the Australian set-up shows enough flexibility to dump Khawaja and move Head up the order as his replacement.
And keep taking it up to England with measured but aggressive cricket as determined by the conditions, which this country was doing with aplomb long before Bazball became a thing. “It’s very Australian to be flamboyant,” Hayden said. “We’ve played that brand in cricket and it’s served us well for two to three decades.
“A lot of my generation grew up watching a West Indian cricket team. That inspired us. I mean, we all wanted to be Viv. I wanted to strut around like Viv, you know, I wanted to play aggressively.” Vivball. Now that was a vibe.
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