Ashes: Facing Australia will be a different ball game for Bazball-powered England

A small rectangular piece of paper was stuck in the corner of Australia’s dressing room in Adelaide during the Test against West Indies last December. Scrawled in slim, almost vague, block letters was “Ron Ball”, a reference to the nickname of Australia coach Andrew ‘Ronald’ McDonald.Steve Smith, the stand-in captain would later explain: “Guys just keep joking about it – I think Ronnie (Andrew McDonald) has had enough of hearing about Bazball to be honest, it’s good fun to joke about.”Later, David Warner, after watching England stumble to an innings defeat against South Africa last year quipped: “If it comes off, it comes off. It’s certainly been entertaining, they’re coming out playing their shots. That’s their brand of cricket. But from our point of view, we’ll be playing Ron Ball.”

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It’s how the world has reacted to all inventions and ideologies. First with wild ridicule. Some cricketers have mocked at Bazball—a coinage that does not amuse Brendon McCullum himself—and left traumatized later. Before the one-off Test in Edgbaston last summer, the Indian fast-bowler Mohammed Siraj crooned: “When we saw the New Zealand series, we realised that every one of our bowlers bowls 140kph plus and New Zealand didn’t have that.” England would hunt down 378 at a lick of nearly five runs an over in the fourth innings.
Ridicule made for skepticism. “I can’t see longevity,” opined South Africa captain Dean Elgar, before his team crashed to a 2-1 series defeat. “I think anyone can, but it’s risky. As a batsman, one bad shot here, and you get everyone on your back,” he had observed before the series that England won in a ruthless demonstration of aggression, with the ball and the bat.
The New Zealand tour was supposed to shackle the batsmen, it did to an extent. but England still managed to square the series (the Test they lost was a solitary run).

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Nearly 15 months after the term Bazball began to swirl and twinkle in the skies of Test cricket, only the cynics and the dogmatic have been averse to the thrill of England playing Test cricket under Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes. So far, an antidote has not been successfully tried. Somewhere it would be. That’s a natural part of evolution. A thesis arises, an antithesis arises too
The soul of the approach is simple. Too simple for comfort. Play a blinding fast brand of cricket, dazzle and destroy the opponent. Aggression is combined with ambition; supreme self-expression is blended with self-belief. A slender degree dinguishes aggression and recklessness, self-belief and self-destruction. To go the records, the method has been unbelievably successful—England have won 11 of the Tests under McCullum. Four of those victories came when chasing an excess of 250 runs in the fourth innings. No side has maintained as stirring run-rates as the Bazballers have (4.65, even Steve Waugh’s Invincibles armed with Adam Gilchr scored at a humbler rate of 3.65).
The aggression is not confined to batters. The field setting is ultra-attacking, the lengths are always offensive. While James Anderson and Stuart Broad are a tad more expensive than they have been under any other captain (2.99 as opposed to 2.55 during the Joe Root era), they have been striking more frequently. If under Root they used to strike every 54th ball, they heckle a wicket with every 43rd ball. It has taken the basic tenets of the game to an unimagined extreme. Only once in 13 games have they not picked all 20 wickets.

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But for any novel philosophy to soar into a game-defining proposition, it needs to keep passing tests, keep themselves adaptive to tweaks and fine-tuning, and not to be too intoxicated or delusional. So far in its exence, it has not passed through as stern a Test as that they would encounter against Australia, the Test champions of the world, the side that possesses Bazball-bursting skill and drive. The other test it has not encountered is the raging subcontinental turner.
Smith was not exaggerating when he doubted if Bazball could survive the combined destructiveness of Pat Cummins and Co. “If you’re on a wicket that’s got some grass and Josh Hazlewood, Pat Cummins and Mitchell Starc are rolling in at you, is it going to be the same?”

It would certainly be a testing proposition—the cunning of Starc, the relentlessness of Cummins, the hustle of Scott Boland and Josh Hazlewood’s mastery of lengths. Bazball-high batters and Ron-ball armed Australia’s seamers would form the central narrative of the series. But there are other layers entangled in the main storyline. Like, the nature of surfaces and Dukes ball.
According to Cricviz, the last England summer was cruel on fast bowlers. It swung and seamed the least since 2005, which meant that England could maintain their gung-ho approach for most of the games. The ball too goes soft swiftly; it goes out of shape rapidly too. However, Dilip Jajodia – owner of the company that manufactures the Dukes ball – has attributed the ball’s ineffectiveness in 2022 to a problem with the leather during a time of heightened Covid disruption, and has promised that the new crop of Dukes would regain its old properties.
If it does, the approach of England batsmen engrosses. Would they could still hedonically Bazball or embrace a more pragmatic approach?. All sporting formulas that have survived and not died a quick death have often continued to evolve, adding more layers to its fundamental philosophy.

Would McCullum and Co tone down the aggression against the most prestigious series in cricket. On one hand is the seductiveness of a philosophic triumph; on the other hand is the desperation to reclaim the urn, irrespective of the method. If England could manage both, it would be era-defining. They have been warned of the perils of such an approach— they endured collapses of 7-41 on the opening day at Lord’s, and 55-6 at the start of their first innings at Headingley in the series against New Zealand. That they still bounced back from such a grim scenario perhaps is a bigger triumph of Bazball.
The flip-side to an overwhelming theme is that it obscures other fascinating plot-lines like the countenancing of James Anderson and Steve Smith or Joe Root and Cummins, or Warner and Broad. Perhaps, that in itself underlines the impact of Bazball that keeps on rolling, fearlessly and uninhibitedly, face-to-face with its toughest adversary yet, the Ron Ball.