The Problem With Bazball
What is Bazball according to the people who play it and talk about it.. and according to what ENG actually do? It is unlike anything IND have seen before in India.
Bazball is that slippery bar of soap on a sleepy Sunday morning. Elusive, irritating, impossible to pin down, it keeps falling and sliding. Bazball is everything and its opposite. The things its protagonists and proponents say about it often leave you wondering - who could possibly disagree with this? As with all such things, it also leaves you wondering if Bazball really is what these people are saying it is, which team doesn’t play Bazball? Joe Root’s 219 ball century in the first innings at Ranchi was “an excellent Bazball innings” according to Lawrence Booth.
Booth is the editor of the Wisden Almanack, and co-author, along with the excellent Nick Hoult (Chief Cricket Correspondent of the Daily Telegraph), of a chronicle of what they call “a Test Cricket Revolution”. This much celebrated book is touted by The Times (which named it one of its 13 best sports books of 2023) as “a superbly sourced account”. But in its telling, The Times also tells us what it thinks Bazball is - “how Ben Stokes and Brendon "Baz" McCullum reinvented Test cricket, revving up a 145-year-old format from a stately amble into an intoxicating, risk-taking, headlong sprint . . . Here's how and why Bazball took conventional cricket wisdom and whacked it out of the ground”.
Booth and Hoult set out their stall in the blurb by saying that “[f]or 145 years, Test cricket was played mainly in one way: batters laid a foundation before daring to attack - and, even then, only if circumstances were favourable. Bowlers tried to bowl maidens, calculating that they would eventually force an error. But the old ways weren't working.”. Now, here is where things become a bit tricky.
It is palpably not the case that “the old ways weren’t working”. The old ways worked for other teams for those 17 Tests (they were beating ENG). The old ways also worked for ENG for much of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. ENG have been the top ranked Test team in the world before. They have had great teams before.
Such shoddy reasoning is not a promising beginning if one wants to learn what Bazball is. But this is what revolutionary origin myths tend to do. They assert Year Zero, and invent the (self-serving) pre-history, history, and often future of the present. The more serious problem with the story of Bazball is its apparent infallibility. When ENG have done well, its been because of Bazball. When they’ve done poorly, its been because they failed to play Bazball. When ENG’s bats took chances an they came off (as in the first innings of the 4th Ashes Test), it was because of Bazball. When ENG’s bats took chances which didn’t come off (as in the 1st and 2nd Ashes Tests), it was because they failed to play Bazball. Duckett’s belligerent 153 in 151 balls was Bazball, as was Roots 122 in 274 balls. Pope’s 196 was Bazball. But his nine low scores were not.
You and I might think that for anything to be, well, a thing, it must be possible for it to both succeed and fail. Bazball is infallible. The players fail it. It has no acknowledged limits. It evidently does not have any falsifiable specifics either.
You can read some of what various ENG players and others say about Bazball at the end of this post. These have been published by Booth & Hoult in their successful book. But for now, consider what ENG actually did here on earth in the 2023/24 season in IND.
In the 2023-24 series in India, ENG bowled less balls of seam bowling per Test than in previous series in India with the exception of their 1961/62 series. They’ve also bowled more balls of spin per Test than in any previous series since 1963/64. They toured with 3 spinners who had 1 Test cap between them, and Jack Leach. Leach was injured, and ENG did not replace him with another spinner. Then Rehan Ahmed, their leg-spinner, was injured and ENG did not bother to replace him either. And even then, they bowled 831 balls of spin per Test and 247 balls of seam per Test.
Before Bazball, ENG fast bowlers - Botham, Willis, Flintoff, Harmison, Broad, Lever, and even Anderson - have toured IND and bowled long spells and offered sustained threat. Botham bowled 240 overs in 6 Tests in 1981/82. Steve Harmison bowled 91 overs in 2 Tests in 2005-06. Anderson bowled 73 in 2 Tests in 2008-09. Andrew Flintoff bowled 84 overs in the same 2 Tests. They were all thrilling to watch, and their monumental effort of bowling quick for that long in IND was truly awesome to watch as a fan of both fast bowling in particular and Test cricket in general.
In 2023-24, all that is in the past. Fast bowling has been but a gesture, even though the pitches have offered some movement off the seam and ENG came with three bowlers - Anderson, Ollie Robinson and Gus Atkinson - known for their ability to move the ball off the pitch. The first two are world class, while the third had a promising World Cup and could have been used. They also brought the genuinely quick Mark Wood.
That’s basically the problem in a nutshell. ENG came with 4 spinners and 4 quicks. They lost two of the spinners to injuries and didn’t bother to replace them (presumably because they didn’t think there was a good enough replacement - either pace or spin). And yet, they didn’t use their experienced fast bowlers. Of the 86 visiting teams who have toured IND for a Test series, only 3 bowled less seam as a share of their total bowling than ENG in 2023/24. AUS in 2022/23, ENG in 1961/62, and Sri Lanka in 1993/94. The pitches (and the availability of Nathan Lyon) justified AUS’s choice.
Does the record suggest that ENG made a serious attempt to take 20 IND wickets in this series? They managed it only 2 times out of 5 against an IND batting line up which was, to put it mildly, unsettled by injuries and withdrawals on the eve of and during the series. ENG have bowled two inexperienced spin bowlers into the ground. Shoaib Bashir bowled 31, 24, 18 and 17 (twice) over spells. It’s all very well to say how good they are. Having bowled them to this extent, no other observation about their bowling is possible. English observers, and the ENG team management can’t really say “well, they were average”. The ball-track record shows that Bashir and Hartley don’t spin the ball as hard as the IND spinners. They don’t get as much turn or drift or dip. Their control of length is not as good either.
That’s what is so difficult to square. On the one hand, we have the vibes and sentiments and high ambition of Bazball. On the other, we have the record of the five Tests which shows no serious strategy to dismiss IND twice. Granted, IND are good, and good opponents stretch the resources of a team. Can ENG really say that they bothered to stretch their resources in the face of the IND side?
With most sides, whether it is IND travelling to ENG and AUS in 2011 or most teams which have travelled to IND in the last 10 years, its simply a matter of the visitors being outgunned and outplayed by a bowling attack superior in quality and depth. But ENG came to IND claiming to have reinvented Test cricket and on a mission to save it. It is difficult to square such talk which not just the quality of ENG’s play, but also the range of ENG’s play.
Hartley and Bashir, it seemed, were not there to compete. Rather, they seemed to be some kind of focus-group approved characters providing respectability in the Bazball show. They were there for appearances sake. To bowl when James Anderson wouldn’t (which was most of the time). Anderson bowled 17, 10, 16, 10, 12, 3 and 12 overs out of the first 80 of IND’s innings in the 7 innings he featured in during the series. Bashir and Hartley looked plausible, they tried, and they even got a few wickets. It didn’t seem to matter that Bashir and Hartley are actual cricketers who have ambition and who get tired. Joe Root tried to help them out in the first half of the series. But about mid-way through, Root seemed to make a decision to stop humoring Test cricket to play Bazball and start humoring Bazball to play Test cricket. He bowled 11 overs and scored 243(492) in the last 2 Tests, compared to 97 overs and 77(157) in the first three.
Teams have lost in IND before. ENG teams have lost in IND before (and won). They have been hard-nosed and uncompromising. They have complained about the pitches and the weather and the food (and back in the day, the umpiring). Those are not pleasant complaints to listen to, but one does not doubt that they are sincere. The Bazballers are different. It never seems to be clear where the Cricket ends and the Performance begins. It has never been clear when the point has been to beat IND, and when it has been to get James Anderson his 700th Test wicket. The omerta surrounding the obvious liability that Anderson has become given how poor he remains with the bat, and how little he bowls (even though, when he does bowl, he is a class bowler), seems to be part of the Performance.
It would perhaps be uncharitable to suggest that ENG seemed to know they would probably be hammered in IND, and so decided to put on an elaborate charade. But that is how it has seemed a lot of the time. Far from being enthralled to such an extent by Test cricket that they want to save it, ENG’s bazballers seemed, at times in this series, to be offended by Test Cricket.
All this will change when ENG play in ENG. They will play a proper bowling attack which will be superior in quality and depth to the visitors’ attack, and ENG will probably win. Bazball will resume after its winter break.
From Booth & Hoult’s Bazball:
Stuart Broad: ‘It is a mentality to get the most freedom and attacking style of play out of you, while loving cricket as much as you can.’
James Anderson: ‘It is trying to remember why you started playing the game. As a kid, you went down to your local club and wanted to hit fours and sixes and knock the stumps out of the ground. You wanted to take the diving catch. When you play international cricket there is pressure, and that can be stifling. Bazball is trying to encourage people to get back to that kid in you, and imagine back to when you started watching cricket and what you wanted to see. How you imagined the game would be played: exciting, fast and fun. That is what Bazball is to me.’
Chris Woakes: ‘The best way to describe it, I suppose, is we try to play expansively, but try not to be reckless. Some people will see it as reckless, but we try to push the boundaries as close to reckless as possible. The entertainment side of it is a big thing – to make sure we’re putting bums on seats.’
Moeen Ali: ‘When you speak to Baz and Stokesy, there is no Bazball. But I think it means a lot of things. It is about doing everything for the team – being selfless, then goingout there and applying pressure when it needs applying, and soaking up pressure with the bat when it needs soaking up. Bowling-wise, it is about taking 20 wickets as quick as possible. And playing with a smile on your face. If you do that well, the results take care of themselves. You might not have a team of world beaters, but if you stick to those methods you will beat any team in the world. That is what it is to me.’
Harry Brook: ‘Good question. What does Bazball mean? The coach doesn’t like the phrase. It’s banned in the dressing-room. Nobody uses it. For me it means… ha ha… well… oh God, great question! If you asked people in the pub, they would say you smack it. But for us it is a bit different. As a batting group, when you get an opportunity to score you take it and don’t hold back. You go hard at them. You’re not out there to survive. Bazball is about the team, not yourself. And enjoying each other’s success.’
Ben Stokes: ‘It's wanting to be a better player. In the face of defeat and failure, Bazball will hopefully inspire people to become better players and become even better than what we are.’ [press conference during ENG v IND Tests]
Ben Foakes: ‘For me, Bazball is not necessarily whacking fours or sixes every ball,’ he says. ‘I’m not someone who does that anyway, so it would be stupid batting. But it’s about being positive. In the past, if an off-spinner is on and I haven’t faced many balls, I’d think: I can’t run down here and whip one. Whereas now, if I’m thinking it, just do it. If it’s a strength of yours, let’s do it, rather than err on the cautious side. That’s the message I take: do what you do, but be brave in doing it.’
Brendon McCulum: ‘Take wickets. We need 20 to win a Test match. With the bat absorb pressure, identify when the time has come to put pressure back on the opposition, be brave enough to pull the trigger. In the field, it is about chasing the ball hard to the boundaries. Three simple philosophies.’
The first rule of Bazball is there is no Bazball
The second rule of Bazball is there is no Bazball