Bazball revisited
Bazball has been the most captivating phenomenon in Test Cricket since, well, take your pick - bodyline? DRS?. At the outset, I should say that I’m skeptical of the virtues of Bazball. I don’t think ENG won in PAK (and squared in NZ) because of it. ENG have an attack of considerable depth and quality in England, and had the better attack in Pakistan. That’s why they won - because they could take 20 wickets. What Bazball gave England is extra time to take 20 wickets. Time alone, is not enough though. The bowling has to be good enough to make use of that time. And the ENG attack has been good enough.
The premise of Bazball, is that, at the flip of a switch, players who had played one way began to play another way, and found about 40 extra runs in every session of play. This is very unlikely to be true. An ENG wicket fell every 48 balls in the Bazball era. The other eleven Test teams lost a wicket every 56 balls in this era (the Bazball era began on June 1, 2022). ENG scored 38.4 runs per wicket, other teams managed 30.7. This is ENG’s trade-off: 38.4(48.2) compared to 30.7(56.3). Given ENG’s bowling, would 30.7(56.3) win them a lot of Tests? Almost certainly.
Still, Harry Brook and Jonny Bairstow did produce some thrilling innings and made runs with a speed and certainty rarely matched in the history of Test cricket. Such bouts of scoring (remember Brian Lara’s 1994 summer season - he never approached that speed and certainty of run scoring in any other season) have occurred in the past, and will occur again in the future. Whether Brook and Bairstow represent a new way of batting in Test cricket is an open question.
An unusual good run of pitches in PAK and NZ helped England’s batters. The 2022 summer in the England was shaped in large part by the peculiar behaviour of the Duke’s ball. The problems began early in the season, and Dukes supplied a fresh batch to English counties in May. It didn’t help, and Broad and Anderson complained publicly during the South Africa series in August. The balls had to be changed regularly because they went out of the shape too easily. Worse, they stopped offering any assistance to the bowlers after about 30 overs because of this. The Test Match Special commentator Daniel Norcross observed that the 2022 Tests were shaped by “a new ball ball” (as opposed to a new ball pitch, which is a good pitch which offers the new ball bowlers some help).
A consequence of this was that the 2022 English Test season was more difficult for batters in the top 3 batting positions than even 2021. For batters in positions 4-6, however, it was the finest season since 2002.
It was the finest season for number 5 and 6 batters in England since 1966, the year when Gary Sobers made 722 runs in 6 Tests batting there.
The difference between the batting averages for batters in positions 1,2,3 and batters in positions 4,5,6 was greater in the English summer in 2022 than any year other than 1966.
Ball-by-Ball records are available for Tests in this century. Before 2022, the average wicket in the first 30 overs of a Test in England cost 31.7 runs, and a wicket between overs 31-80 cost 34.02 runs. In 2022, these figures were 26.1 and 40.5.
It is undeniable that ENG’s bazballers chose to take more frequent chances than the average Test batters normally do. This, in essence, is the distinct feature which constitutes Bazball. The success of this method, however, is shaped by the conditions. Now, it could be argued (and perhaps with some merit), that these conditions are available in Test cricket more frequently than Test batters appreciate. But it is unlikely that a bad batch of balls will be a commonplace feature in Tests.
There are, in summary, some good reasons to be skeptical of Bazball. In 2022, a lot of great fast bowlers bowled in England - Anderson, Broad, Rabada, Nortje, Bumrah, Shami, Boult, Southee. In 2023, it will be Cummins, Hazlewood and Starc bowling in England. Assuming that the Duke’s ball problem has been sorted out, we should find out a lot in the 2023 summer.
A reversion to the mean is more likely than the persistence of Bazball.
Here’s a conversation I had with Dan Norcross about Bazball in July 2022, after four of the seven Tests of the 2022 summer had been played.
