So long, Bazball: What’s next for Poms after ‘selfish’ deathcult that ‘won nothing’

“We’ve managed to become a sports team that will live forever in the memory of people who were lucky enough to witness us play cricket”.

So said Ben Stokes in the aftermath of England’s Ashes-deciding draw with Australia in the fourth Test of the 2023 series.

The tourists had been saved by rain after three days of torture, a disastrous bowling display showcasing a team run into the ground by a relentless English mindset of attack, attack, attack.

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A 2-2 scoreline meant Australia escaped its first encounter with Bazball with its hold on the Ashes intact.

But the players, having headed into the series as World Test Champions, were under no illusions over how the series had played out.

“We definitely got out of jail,” Cameron Green told media in the aftermath.

Twelve months on from Brendon McCullum’s appointment as Test coach after a historically bad run of losses, Bazball was ascendant.

England had followed rampant, remarkable wins over New Zealand and South Africa at home, and an even more extraordinary 3-0 sweep of Pakistan on some of the flattest pitches imaginable, by proving their method could work against an Australian bowling attack labelled the world’s best.

But it would prove a false dawn.

Three years on, the Ashes are as out of reach as ever, now fast approaching a decade in Australian hands.

From that moment, until the era ended in disgrace with Stokes’ abrupt retirement and McCullum’s axing as Test coach, cricket’s most infamous fugazi this side of Bodyline fizzled into nothing.

‘PROOF IN THE PUDDING’: BAZBALL’S FINEST HOUR

England’s first post-Ashes Test assignment – on the other side of a disastrous 2023 World Cup title defence – produced unquestionably its greatest triumph of all, a 28-run win over India in Hyderabad.

Trailing by 190 after the first innings, a fearless 196 from Ollie Pope vindicated McCullum’s faith in the hitherto unspectacular right-hander as a long-term No.3, as a lethal spin trio of Ravichandran Ashwin, Ravi Jadeja and Axar Patel were disdainfully reverse-swept time and again.

Fortune favoured the brave with the ball, too. Defending just 231, debutant spinner Tom Hartley, selected for his height over far more prolific bowlers at county level, bamboozled his way to a seven-wicket haul, and the team to a memorable 28-run win.

“If anybody had questions around whether Bazball would work in India, there’s the proof in the pudding,” said former Indian spinner Kartik Murali on the broadcast.

Unable to bowl, Stokes nevertheless summed up his usual magic with a brilliant run out of Jadeja. The man, it seemed, could do no wrong.

“What I like about them is their stubbornness. If you doubt them, they’ll double down on it and go even more stubborn,” wrote former great Nasser Hussain for Sky Sports.

McCullum’s record as coach read: 14 wins, one draw, four losses.

Bazball had stood up against the best in the world, and in conditions seemingly ill suited to their mentality.

‘EMBARRASSING’ MOMENT SPARKS BAZBALL DOWNFALL

But that stubbornness wouldn’t work for long.

One Test later, a Jasprit Bumrah masterclass and first day double-century from precocious opener Yashasvi Jaiswal hauled India back into the series with a 106-run win.

Widely derided were veteran quick Jimmy Anderson’s comments at the end of the third day’s play, with England 1/67 in pursuit of a record 399 for victory.

“The nerves were there to see,” Anderson said of India’s batting approach in their second innings.

“They didn’t know how many was enough … the chat last night from the coach was that if they get 600, we were going to go for it.”

Three more comfortable defeats followed as India ended the series 4-1 victors, with England crushed by 434 runs in Rajkot, then by an innings and 64 in Dharamsala.

Among the previously converted, doubts were blooming.

“The team message is never to doubt anything, never admit they were wrong or they could have done things differently … that does not breed an environment of ruthlessness,” wrote Michael Vaughan in The Telegraph.

Headlining the lowlights was a reverse-scoop from Joe Root off Bumrah, a shot he had dazzled with during the Ashes, sending the ball straight to slip to spark an England collapse.

It was swiftly dubbed “the worst, most stupid shot in the history of England’s Test cricket” by Telegraph writer Scyld Berry, and “embarrassing” by Geoff Boycott.

Stokes’ response?

“Everyone has an opinion or a perception of things but the people in the dressing room really matter to us.”

Ben Duckett added: “I’d be interested to know if those people were against it when he was doing it to Pat Cummins and hitting him for six in last summer’s Ashes.”

In the space of a few weeks, Hussain’s “stubbornness” seemed less an unshaking belief in Bazball and more a refusal to accept needing to refine it.

Clear as well was that the team’s public commitment to it was wearing thin; the ‘cult’ fast losing its backers from outside the dressing room that Stokes had said was all that concerned him.

The cliff was there for everyone to see.

McCullum’s team, though, were content to plough straight over it.

‘YOU F***ERS’: BIZARRE SELECTION HYPOCRISY IN GREAT’S AXING

Slowly eating away at Bazball’s aura of invincibility was Stokes and McCullum’s desire to reduce its reliance on an ageing core of senior heads.

A rare bright spot in India was Anderson becoming the first Englishman, and first pace bowler, to reach 700 Test wickets.

Yet mere weeks later, the 41-year old was told his time, save for a farewell Test at Lord’s, was up.

At the time, Anderson accepted the decision, telling the BBC: “It was sort of just looking ahead and could a 43-year-old me make the Ashes in 18 months’ time and we sort of came to the decision that probably not.”

However, he’d reveal in his autobiography that he felt “like Joe Pesci in Goodfellas, ushered into a room under the impression that I’m going to get made, only to be shot”.

“You f***ers. They’re going to tell me something I don’t want to be told, aren’t they?” he wrote.

Two years on, Anderson remains a staple for Lancashire at county level, while his reliability, accuracy and deadly swing have never been replaced at the national level.

Combined with Stuart Broad’s retirement following the 2023 Ashes – unlike Anderson, on completely his own terms – the push to rejuvenate a bowling attack which at Bazball’s beginning was heavily reliant on two stalwarts of the game makes sense.

But raising eyebrows was the decision to retain another veteran Chris Woakes to lead the post-Anderson attack; a superb cricketer named England’s Player of the Series in 2023, but with a horrendous record in Australia and, indeed, overseas in general.

“If Woakes isn’t going to play in the next Ashes, why is he still being picked if the name of the game is building a bowling attack that can win in Australia?” wrote Chris Stocks in the I Paper.

Then 35, Woakes would retire from international cricket at the end of the 2025 summer.

England would be left to rely upon the fragile body of Jofra Archer, an inexperienced young tyro in Josh Tongue, and the uncertain quality of Brydon Carse and Gus Atkinson, for the 2025/26 Ashes.

‘UP THEIR OWN BACKSIDES’: THE ‘GLORIFIED STAG DO’ THAT BROUGHT POMS DOWN

Despite an impressive away series win over New Zealand in late 2024, the cracks were starting to show for Bazball.

Pakistan, trounced again on home soil via an England record 454-run partnership between Root and Harry Brook, reverted to spin-friendly pitches for the remainder of that series, with the tourists going from 7/823 in the first Test to scores of 291, 144, 267 and 112 from there.

That, plus a frustrating 2-2 squared series against a rebuilding India on home soil, meant McCullum and Stokes headed to Australia for the defining series of their reign still yet to beat either fellow member of the ‘Big Three’.

Seen as England’s best chance of defeating the Aussies since their last Ashes win in 2015, against a fragile home batting attack and with injury clouds over Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, what followed was the stuff of nightmares.

They got a taste of their own medicine from Travis Head to complete a whirlwind two-day Test in Perth to kick things off.

A team bonding trip to Noosa, the latest brain child of a McCullum coaching philosophy always more content with a round or six of golf over a hard day’s training, would spiral so disastrously that Key would announce an investigation into it before the tour was even over.

The players being so keen on sinking pints and soaking in the sun that a morning run organised by the strength and conditioning coach saw just three of them attend – including only Jamie Smith from the team trounced in Perth – became this generation’s equivalent of David Gower piloting a Tiger Moth biplane during the 1991/92 Ashes.

“It was a glorified stag do,” Stephan Shelmit wrote for the BBC.

On the field, Stokes and his team’s unshaking belief in the Bazball ethos came unstuck, when it became painfully clear the approach wasn’t going to cut the mustard in the series they had been building towards for three years.

At the Gabba, after a sloppy fielding display had let Australia off the hook for a commanding first innings lead, the captain all but surrendered: stonewalling for 152 balls for a half-century that merely delayed the inevitable.

“Australia is not for weak men,“ Stokes told the BBC after defeat at the Gabba, a quote that would define the tour.

“A dressing room that I am captain of is not a place for weak men either.”

While the team would take advantage of a diabolical MCG pitch to secure their first Test win in Australia in 15 years, a 4-1 defeat turned Bazball into a joke – though not many in England could see the funny side.

“They are up their own backsides convinced that Test cricket has changed so much that only they know anything about the modern game,” was Boycott’s stinging view in The Telegraph.

Never shy of making brave decisions against conventional wisdom, England suddenly got gun-shy amid the high stakes of Ashes cricket.

Zak Crawley, a Bazball poster boy from day one, registered a pair in Perth and hasn’t featured at Test level since the fifth Test in Sydney.

Shoaib Bashir, plucked from county obscurity for the 2024 tour of India because Stokes liked his bowling action, made the Ashes tour but wasn’t backed in for a single Test, leaving England to rely on the dire off-spin of batting all-rounder Will Jacks.

McCullum, primarily due to taking over as the team’s white-ball coach in January 2025, was spared the axe after a semi-final run at the T20 World Cup a few months after the disaster down under.

But neither he nor Stokes would make it to year’s end.

‘PUB TEAM ON THE PROFESSIONAL CIRCUIT’: A GLEEFUL EULOGY

It was only fitting that Bazball, instigated by a New Zealander and with its initial success sparked by victories over New Zealand, would meet its end at the hands of the same nation.

After a first Test victory proved the great Kane Williamson’s swansong, the team’s off-field antics again caused a stir, with Stokes and Atkinson suspended for the second Test after an altercation at a bar in the wee hours following their win.

Neither was at fault beyond the crime of being there in the first place, but an ECB which bemoaned the team’s lack of discipline in The Ashes gleefully brought down the cane.

Both returned for the decisive third Test, but an angry, disillusioned Stokes had had enough.

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But while he was celebrated for his achievements with standing ovations throughout his final day as an international cricketer, the manner of his exit rankled many.

Stokes’ last act as captain would prove a fitting end for Bazball: promoting himself to open the batting in pursuit of an unlikely 373 for victory, and pushing youngster Emilio Gay down the order as a result, the great all-rounder bludgeoned his way to a slapdash 30 off 20 balls before inevitably falling.

“It was utterly needless, entirely self-centred ... and mind-meltingly stunning from a renegade allrounder who built his legacy out of astounding displays, but none quite like this,” wrote Vithushan Ehantharajah for ESPNcricinfo.

“Stokes’ captaincy tenure began in 2022 with a call for 10 selfless cricketers. It ended with Stokes at his most selfish.”

Cricket broadcaster Adam Collins called, meanwhile, for McCullum to follow him out the door too.

“How on earth is Brendon McCullum still the coach of that team, when he is meant to be in that dressing room, working in an axis with the captain in making good decisions?” he said on The Final Word.

“The fact that New Zealand were legitimately laughing at England through the stump mics was telling.

“That night, they should have sacked McCullum. They should have sacked him again on Day 5.”

The Black Caps players weren’t the only ones laughing when, this week, Collins got his wish with the ECB’s announcement that the Test team would require a new coach.

Never ones to shy away from mocking England, The Grade Cricketer’s Sam Perry and Ian Higgins gleefully ripped into Bazball’s long and proud history of glorifying itself.

“After Australia had retained the urn [in 2023], Harry Brook said that an England win in that [fifth] Test could almost make it a moral victory,” Perry remembered.

It’s not the only landmark of Bazball’s failures to feature an accompanying English quote, either.

“Jaiswal scored a hundred against England [in the 2024 series] – Ben Duckett said ‘When you see players from the opposition playing like that, it almost feels like we should take some credit that they’re playing differently than how other people play Test cricket’,” Perry said.

Broadcast doyen Gerard Whateley, meanwhile, bemoaned a ‘cult-like fervour’ that started so promisingly but quickly grew out of hand.

“Bazball didn’t win anything. Its victories were moral, not tangible,” Whateley eulogised on radio station SEN.

“Removing consequence from professional sport was a thought bubble that exploded under the first sign of pressure.

“England’s cricketers bailed out rather than dug in. They created positions of promise through outrageous enterprise and then squandered them through compulsion.

“Bazball won nothing. That is what should be chiselled on its gravestone.

“The flawed concept was one thing; the lack of discipline quite another.

“England tried to be a pub team on the professional circuit. It ended embarrassingly and woefully.”

‘MORE TO PLAY OUT’: BAZBALL IS DONE ... BUT IS STOKES?

England head into the post-Bazball era with no captain, no coach, a misfiring batting order, no trustworthy spinner, and a bowling attack in desperate need of a leader.

Their response, it seems, will be to go back to the future.

Andy Flower is a clear favourite to reassume the job he lost following the 2013/14 Ashes whitewash, with his reputation for discipline seen as a tonic for an England team renowned for its lack.

As for the captaincy, Joe Root is likely to, at least temporarily, take up the mantle that ran him dry before Stokes took over four years ago, having stood in as skipper in the second Test against New Zealand.

And Stokes?

A fractured relationship with McCullum played at least a part in his abrupt departure from international cricket.

Now that the New Zealander has followed out the door, a John Farnham-style comeback tour can’t be completely discounted.

“Maybe Stokes isn’t done now,” former Australian Test opener Ed Cowan said on the ABC.

“Maybe not this summer, but take some time out - he’s going back to cricket for Durham - he makes a little Ashes comeback.

“I think there’s more to play out with the Stokes retirement, and I think as that emerges, and some clarity is gained, it felt like it was almost a protest in the end.

“To the system, to the coach, to a whole range of other aspects.”

It wouldn’t even be the first time Stokes has backtracked on retiring.

In July 2022, he quit ODI cricket to focus on his Test and T20I duties, only to make a comeback as part of England’s squad for the 2023 World Cup.

That decision, though, proved a poor one, with the team struggling and Stokes himself accused of selfishness by former Australian captain Tim Paine.

“It was a bit of ‘me, me, me’ there, isn’t it?” Paine said on SEN.

“It was, ‘I’ll play in the big tournaments’ ... the guys who played for 12 months, ‘Sorry, thanks. But can you go and sit on the bench because I want to play now?’”

To un-retire before an Ashes campaign would be even braver - or madder - and then, of course, there’s the question of whether a middling return in Tests in recent years, particularly with the bat, makes him an automatic selection.

In the interim, the plan is for a new coach to be named, if not necessarily in office, by the start of a three-Test series against Pakistan in August that concludes the English summer, before three Tests in South Africa over the Christmas period and the 150th anniversary Tests against Australia at the MCG in March next year.

Front of mind for everyone, though, is the Ashes - and this time, the roles are reversed.

An Australian team which has achieved nearly everything has the scent of a first series win in England since 2001. Stokes and Broad, long-standing nemeses, are seemingly out of the picture.

For England, the situation is perilous.

Batting-wise, Root and Brook, England’s heaviest run-scorers under McCullum, have been unable to adapt to wicketkeepers standing up to the stumps to stop their nimble footwork to pace bowlers, with Alex Carey set to reprise that tactic next year.

Two men on whom McCullum and England devoted 64 Test apiece and endless patience, Zak Crawley and Ollie Pope, aren’t even in the picture these days, either.

That is the position Bazball has left England in. A leaderless, rudderless shell, rife with ill discipline, outthought and outgunned.

And, seemingly, ripe for the picking for an Australian team that, for all its own struggles, will never get a better chance to create history.

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