‘It was brilliant decision to declare’: Mark Taylor analyses Stokes’s Bazball approach and praises Cummins’s temperament

Mark Taylor, legendary Australian captain, is clearly a great fan of England’s attacking approach in Tests but also admires Pat Cummins’s temperament and his willingness to consult Steve Smith for captaincy tips.
“Bazball suits England cricket at the moment because the side was playing very poorly leading into this era, and your best players are aggressive players,” Taylor tells Mike Atherton in The Times. “It’s not groundbreaking stuff. Your job as a leader is to bring the best out of your players. So if you have defensive players who want to bat long then play a long, defensive game but if you have aggressive players, get them to play their natural game. I stayed in the same hotel as the England team in Birmingham and I could sense that they are relaxed and genuinely enjoying their cricket and that’s half the battle.

“Harry Brook is a very good player. Zak Crawley I think is a good player, although he likes to go fishing outside off stump a lot. They see the ball early, pick up length early which is the sign of a good player, so if your best players are aggressive players then play aggressive cricket.”
Much of Bazball, when fielding or batting, is not letting the game drift aimlessly, and Taylor loves that facet. He cites the Usman Khawaja dismissal in the second innings, when Ben Stokes went around the stumps and slipped in a slower ball with three fingered-grip that was played on to the stumps.
“The Khawaja dismissal in the second innings was a classic piece of Stokes captaincy. Round the wicket, a slightly different field set to a batsman who was in and settled, bowling what we in Australia call a “nude nut”, a blancmange ball, which Khawaja chopped on to his stumps. It’s not always the magnificent delivery, it’s about trying to find ways to create doubt and uncertainty or change a batsman’s thought process,” Taylor said.

Stokes declared England innings closed late on the opening day with 393 on the board; in hindsight it was criticised. Taylor doesn’t concur with that criticism, though.
“Ninety-nine percent of captains would take 400 in the first innings, so now Stokes is thinking, ‘I can put Warner and Khawaja under pressure for 25 minutes.’ To me it’s a no-brainer. I thought it was a brilliant declaration.
“They didn’t take any wickets in that final 25 minutes but did you see the running between the wickets from Warner and Khawaja that night? Panicky. They have played cricket together since under-14s but were running like they’d never batted before together. A couple of 36-year-olds, one with more than 100 Tests, one with nearly 70, and they are running like they’ve never played before. All because of that declaration.”
Taylor’s one criticism was with their batting approach on day four in the second innings.

“You don’t have to bring the opposition back into it; there’s nothing wrong with batting Australia out of the game. People may say that’s conservative but I don’t think it is. Just play appropriately. Joe [Root] didn’t look like getting out; he played a rash shot and you have to take some accountability for that. That’s the time England got a bit carried away,” said Taylor.
Taylor also admired Pat Cummins’s approach as Australian captain. Australia preferred to go rope-a-dope, playing catch-up after England threw in the first punch on all days.
“I sensed watching the first game that no longer playing the dominant role, if that’s how you want to put it, doesn’t worry Pat. He seemed quite comfortable with it. It worried me more than him. I wondered whether they had gone too far into a defensive mode, almost as if they were saying, ‘We are going to go the other way and be more conservative than we would normally be.’ I wasn’t against a deep point from the outset, but I was surprised with the deep square leg, especially as we didn’t bowl a bouncer for an hour and a half. So I thought that was an overreaction.
“But what I like about Pat is that he doesn’t have a big ego. He’s confident in himself for sure and is no shrinking violet as we saw at the end of the game, but he’s not the type to let his ego get in the way. That was a great Test for him to win, just for the validation that the method worked. You can imagine if they hadn’t won, all the questions around whether Australia should be upping the ante, so I reckon it came as a huge relief.

“I’ve always maintained it’s easier to do the job as a batsman, because the big moments are on the field and particularly if you are a fast bowler having to think about all the other stuff, it’s not easy. I think Pat has been clever in the way he’s used Steve Smith. A great mate of mine and a bit of a mentor, Ian Chappell, hates it as he thinks it’s the captain’s responsibility alone to make decisions, but I think as a fast-bowling captain, it’s smart to almost hand it over when bowling.”
“That’s what made this Test, and will make the series, even more watchable. That extra dimension of, what will Stokes do now? What will Cummins do in response? People like you and me, we live for that,” Taylor told Atherton.