The last couple of years of English cricket have been a fascinating experiment. Only someone wilfully denying how radical England’s approach is could see how unusual and unique their style is. However, there is fundamental cricketing logic behind it, but I cannot help but feel this is just a hair-brained scheme, with limited long-term feasibility. After all, winning is the only thing that matters, and it is increasingly under question how good Bazball is at making England win.
England have now lost 6 of their last 7 tests in Asia, with the attacking style seemingly most vulnerable against spin, with crushing defeats to India and now Pakistan in the last year. This has been put into perspective by New Zealand’s recent win away in India, highlighting how disappointing England’s displays were there at the start of the year, and how invalid their excuses about how difficult it is were. England seems happy to settle for mediocrity.
This is similar to their batting. Too often, England seems happy to throw their wickets away, losing their heads and playing poor shots. It takes mental strength to be a top-class test match batsman and England falls back far too readily on stupid and reckless shots, avoiding the fight when it looks like it will get tough. This is not a new trend; England lost the chance to win the Ashes for this reason, with silliness at Edgbaston and Lord’s, and England’s ability to score runs too often relies on the benign nature of many of the wickets they may be playing on. The top three, Crawley, Duckett, and Pope, all are very poor technically, and while Duckett has, in fairness, shown an ability to score consistent runs at Test, neither of the other two have, and have already racked up a huge number of test caps between them.
There is a nasty hubris in this England team. Regardless of how poorly they play, there is never accountability, with the nonsensical mantra that ‘there are no bad shots’ being cultishly chanted by players being interviewed after a day’s play, in which England have played countless bad shots. Rob Key, England’s Managing Director, certainly has his favourites; his approach to selecting batsmen relies largely on a small cadre of players, who are stuck regardless of form or overall record, and his selection of bowlers seems to revolve around being tall and having a poor domestic record. It is as if Key is trying to prove a point, rather than select the best team, and while on occasion his selections look like masterstrokes, there is little evidence that his approach makes the team any better, with the underlying logic of the choices he makes, and how he justifies them, being utterly baffling.
The prevailing attitude of six-hitting contests and a fundamentally unserious attitude held by the team and ECB hierarchy may yield certain extraordinary wins, such as the one in Ahmedabad and more recently in the first test against Pakistan in Multan, but increasingly, it leads to humiliating and futile defeats. The Cricketer’s George Dobell put it perfectly; ‘I think they’re a fairly extraordinary team, but they’re just not that good.’
What is most disappointing, is that, for all the naval-gazing and defeatism during Joe Root’s tenure as captain, England do not seem to have progressed much, if at all, in the years since Ben Stokes was appointed. It is frustrating that the press around the team has been so positive, and while it feels as though the tide is starting to turn somewhat, the team has been underachieving for some time now. Fundamentally, under Root, England was an inconsistent, flaky team, who would flatter to deceive more often than not, winning mostly at home whilst getting soundly beaten away, and now, under Stokes, we remain an inconsistent, flaky and frustrating side, which mostly wins at home and gets soundly beaten away. Now there is just an added cultish tendency around selection and approach.
Given the all-or-nothing commitment required for Bazball to function, it appears that every knockback undermines the approach further, and makes Key, McCullum, Stokes, and the players more and more detached from reality.
“Rob Key + George Digweed” by FieldsportsChannel.tv is licensed under CC BY 2.0.