Overview:
The Bazball strategy was suspended late in Brisbane when Stokes played a conservative hand in trying to save the day-night test.
The architects of the Bazball revolution that England aimed to use to summit test cricket have conceded the preparation wasn’t quite right for the Ashes. That’s not to say the strategy will be shelved. After arriving on Australian shores with great expectations, coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes were intent on imposing the attack-at-all-costs strategy on the contest for the oldest trophy in cricket.
After just one warmup game — an internal trial against the second-string England lineup — it quickly backfired.
Relying on a pragmatic, conventional approach to the game and long experience of the conditions, Australia retained the Ashes on Sunday with two matches remaining.
“Retrospectively, we lost 3-0 so you would probably say there was room for change there,” McCullum told British broadcaster TNT Sport in terms of the preparations. “You put your hand up as a coach and say you might not have got that right.”
After England lost the first two tests by eight wickets, McCullum decided the squad had overdone it in training between the outings in Perth and Brisbane and decided to give the players a break at Noosa, one of Australia’s premier beach resort villages.
The rest and relaxation did improve one statistic — in Adelaide England made it to Day 5 of a test for the first time on tour.
McCullum had been building for the Ashes series for years but hasn’t yet been able to break the long drought in Australia extending back to 2011.
“We came here with high hopes, high ambitions and lofty goals,” he said. “And we’ve been outplayed across three test matches.”
The Bazball strategy was suspended late in Brisbane when Stokes played a conservative hand in trying to save the day-night test. In the last two days in Adelaide, with some glaring expectations, the batters at least tried to grit it out at the crease rather than hit the ball out of the ground every over.
“The last two days have been our best cricket, and that’s because we’ve just played,” McCullum said. “The previous nine days, we were so caught up and so driven to achieve something and succeed that we’ve almost got in our own way and we’ve stymied our talent and our skill and our ability.”