Ashes to ashes, ducks to ducks: the end of Bazball?

Unprepared, arrogant, immature. These are just some of the words being used to describe England’s approach down under that saw them lose the Ashes to Australia after just three Test matches and 11 days of cricket.

In the three and half years since Brendon McCullum took over as coach of the England men’s team, the so-called “Bazball” philosophy he pioneered with captain Ben Stokes “told us that nothing was impossible, that no run chase was too big, that no situation was irretrievable, that no ambition was too haughty”, said the Daily Mail.

England’s final capitulation in Adelaide on Sunday “felt like more than the end of just a game of cricket. It felt like the end of an idea. It felt like that part of a revolution where an ideal bows to realpolitik and the thrill of the new is lost forever.”

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

A tale of two openers

“Perhaps nobody embodies the emasculation of this England team on this tour, and the emasculation of the philosophy that has underpinned their challenge” more than England opener Ben Duckett, said former England captain Mike Atherton in The Times.

The “unorthodox, rasping opener” who “prides himself on how few balls he leaves at the top of the order” has racked up a grand total of 97 runs over the course of six innings in Australia, being dismissed for a golden duck in the second Test.

Contrast this with the famed England opener of yesteryear, Geoffrey Boycott, who won two tours of Australia and drew the other two. “Never really known for going on the attack as a player,” the now 85-year-old “has been on the offensive as England has laboured through this Ashes tour”, said the ABC.

In a scathing assessment of Bazball, Boycott hammered the team as “irresponsible, rubbish and too far up their backsides to care” and claimed “hubris has taken over from common sense”.

‘Bazball as we knew it is in the skip’

Bazball was named after coach McCullum, whose nickname is Baz. In its “pure form”, it “defined Test cricket as a game of batting intent”, said The Guardian, but “as Australia have demonstrated, it is above all a bowling game”.

While there is “no disgrace at all in losing to these opponents”, England’s “failure lies in the nature of that defeat, in losing not just quickly but sloppily, losing in a way that speaks to a basic lack of tension and discipline, a refusal not just to do your homework, but to recognise that homework exists at all”.

After Adelaide, McCullum was quick to hold his hand up and admit that “we haven’t got everything right” in the series, including England’s much-criticised preparations and failure to play any proper warm-up matches.

This rare moment of introspection “is a massive step forward” for the England coach, said the BBC’s chief cricket commentator Jonathan Agnew, but “Bazball as we knew it is in the skip”.

It “now resembles something hollowed out”, said the Daily Mail. Over the course of three “sobering, humbling Test defeats, a philosophy that once carried all along with it but has become divisive and polarising, has had its soul ripped out and its entrails pored over by those who are now happy to say they always feared it would end like this”.

Attention will inevitably now turn to the futures of McCullum, managing director Rob Key and even Stokes. They may try to claim England’s “death-or-glory style can be retooled and rise again”, said Reuters. “In reality, it is unlikely to survive the bitter post-mortem that looms at the end of a series that had promised so much and has, to date, yielded so little.”