India vs England: Will Ben Stokes look at the lost series as a failure or achievement of Bazball? | Cricket News

After a certain point, there is no turning back. Like Ben Stokes’ relationship with the philosophy of Bazball. Once the choice is made, in a sense, Stokes is liberated. Or that’s the impression he and his Bazballers have given. That urge and confidence has been questioned a couple of times in this series, but the England skipper has managed to soldier on.
Stokes’ vision, urges and interventions have been spellbinding to track on the ground. Saddled with a weak bowling attack – the main difference between the two teams which has been further widened the conditions carefully chosen India – Stokes has somehow made his bowling unit look far better than it actually is with constant chats, and imaginative-but-always-purposefully-set fields.
But in a long Test series, the inherent vulnerabilities were exposed even against an average Indian batting line-up.
Cricket – Fourth Test – India v England – JSCA International Stadium Complex, Ranchi, India – February 25, 2024 England’s Ben Stokes inspects the ball with teammates during the match REUTERS/Amit Dave
In the recent past, England have often climbed mountains on the back of Stokes the batsman but unfortunately for them, that hasn’t happened in this series as yet. He has not been able to grab the ball and fire away his bouncers either, as was his wont.
It’s tempting to say that all of Stokes’ emotional energy has been so taken the task of handling his bowlers that his batting headspace isn’t where it needed to be, but that won’t be accurate. His defensive game on turners (albeit slow in this series) has never quite held up and his decision about what length to press back to can often be disastrous. He plays the line and remains vulnerable to balls that do something different to what he anticipates. Really good batsmen tend to stay alert in the moment to adjust and adapt to attempt jail-breaks till the end, but Stokes’ batting approach compels him to commit to a single strain of thought. Or so it feels. ‘Let me go back and push here, let me stretch forward to defend here’. The hands aren’t malleable enough to adjust to any trickery from the track or the bowlers’ release. In that sense, the Dharamsala pitch might be his best chance to unleash the Stokes that the world knows, if he can escape the clutches of Jasprit Bumrah.
Bazball was faced with two pivotal moments in this series: the Vizag chase, and in England’s second innings at Rajkot. At Vizag, they overcooked Bazball; forget turning back, they stormed ahead on adrenalin, and failed. At Rajkot, both Joe Root and Stokes let them down with shot selection and execution, respectively.
Tough assignment
The collapse in their second innings in the last Test at Ranchi wasn’t unexpected. As Stokes himself said, batting against the skill of Ravichandran Ashwin, Kuldeep Yadav and Co on that pitch was very tough for them. It would have needed far more than the structure of Bazball; it needed sparkling original talent against that kind of bowling in those conditions. Not many batting units possess that.
For example, what else could Ollie Pope have done to negotiate that LBW ball first up from Ashwin. Released from between the thumb and the forefinger, let out on the leg-and-middle line, Pope did his utmost to hold balance and not play across too early. But the ball not only straightened as that grip and release suggested it would, but hit the seam and broke into an alarmed Pope, who would gesture that ball-movement to his partner while waiting for the DRS verdict. It’s in those situations that Stokes often pulls off a jaw-dropping counter-attack to carry England on his back, but they usually come on non-sub-continental tracks.
Stokes seems to be in a space where he is able to avoid those inner questions morphing into severe doubts, and move on. Root showed how he could move on with a superb ton at Ranchi. Stokes has often been frosty at media interactions, particularly with England’s journals. Even the questions are asked with a sense of wariness as if no one wants to step on the eggshells around him. “He just doesn’t like the media. Perhaps they think they are dumb questions. Or thinks they are out to criticise our approach. The Bazball bubble! (Head coach Brendon) McCullum too is like that.” Says a UK journal who is a great fan of England’s attacking approach. Stokes’ past with the media, when he was younger and frequently into trouble, is well documented; perhaps those embers still fester. “But they have actively used that bubble to sort of fortress themselves against the world, so to speak – us vs them, and back each other to do what they do. It drives them.”
Bazball video for IND vs ENG Test series copy embeds:
Not many captains have marched into an Indian tour with a weak bowling attack, and with a batting unit not really expected to handle the conditions, and yet prove so competitive and entertaining. Stokes’ greatest achievement is that India were forced to alter their pitches drastically from the past. If only Stokes the batsman had turned up, the end result could have been different.
To make India produce ‘un-Indian’ pitches is Bazball’s accomplishment; it’s also India’s tactical accomplishment that they were willing not to get into a battle of egos, especially self-aware of their own batsmen’s limitations, and went the way they did with the pitches.