England’s cricketers have lost the Ashes, after being defeated in the third Test match in Adelaide by 82 runs. The Adelaide defeat follows humiliating routs by eight wickets in both Perth and Brisbane, leaving us 3-0 down; after barely 11 days of cricket, the five-match series is now a dead rubber. We lost the previous three Ashes series ‘down under’ 5-0, 4-0 and 4-0. Apparently England’s cricket management learned nothing from those reality checks.
The Bazball experiment has just been stress-tested, found wanting, pulverised and buried
And to make it all worse, we’d been told that this tour would be different. Regaining the Ashes was to be the culmination of a project that began in June 2022 when Brendon McCullum took over as coach. He and captain Ben Stokes immediately insisted on a completely new mindset: ‘Bazball’ – aggressive, high-risk cricket played with no fear of the consequences. The batsmen were to go for their shots: even if they failed, they wouldn’t be dropped. It became a team that was very hard to get into – or out of.
And, at first, it worked. Playing audacious, gung-ho cricket, England were soon winning in grand style. At a stroke a defeatist mindset – the previous regime had seen England win only one of their last 17 Tests – had been swept away.
But it wasn’t long before other cricketing nations adjusted and began to find ways to combat Bazball. In the summer of 2023 on home soil we could only draw the series 2-2, allowing Australia to retain the Ashes. That failure was shrugged off as a moral victory: we were, after all, clearly winning at Old Trafford before the weather intervened. And anyway it didn’t matter because we were going to regain the Ashes in the most satisfying way possible: by blowing the Australians away in Australia. But exactly the opposite has happened. The Bazball experiment has just been stress-tested, found wanting, pulverised and buried.
So what now? Probably for many the tour can’t end soon enough. There are however still two matches left to play. It would be wonderful if we could salvage some pride by winning at Melbourne and Sydney. But given how much better and how much more ruthless the Australians are, that’s highly unlikely. If we can’t win, then we could at least make things more difficult for the Aussies, instead of rolling over and pretending that we only lost because we weren’t really trying. We could make them fight for victory.
We also could bring in new players to replace the demoralised seniors who’ve lost the first three matches and who only know the discredited Bazball way. With nothing on the line, half a dozen promising youngsters could get a taste of Ashes cricket in Australia; the experience would stand them in good stead when we next tour. The newcomers could be instructed to play traditional, Test-match cricket, making the Aussies fight for every wicket and every run. Instead of losing inside two days as we did at Perth, we could aim to take the remaining games deep into the fifth day. We could give the long-suffering England supporters who’ve paid small fortunes to follow the team something to cheer about.
We could but we won’t. England are loath to take these opportunities. Instead, expect to be told that ‘The players who got us into this mess must now be given the chance to get us out of it.’ And that besides, it would be wrong to throw youngsters in at the deep end; the experience would traumatise them. Oh, and don’t be surprised if we’re told that anyway many of the England Lions (effectively the reserves) are, very conveniently, no longer available.
I hope I’m wrong but if essentially the same team takes the field for the final two games, it’s hard to see us winning, drawing, putting up much of a fight or even learning anything new. And a golden opportunity to start the rebuild will have been lost. But rest assured: once the whitewash is complete, the cricketing authorities will suddenly leap into action and announce a wide-ranging ‘High Performance Review’ committed, yet again, to making England ‘the best team in the world’. It happens every time.
