Not a fancy moniker anymore, Bazball has become a way of life - and it works

The Hyderabad Test will go down in history as one of the greatest performances by a visiting team in India since - take a guess - England in Mumbai in 2012. Allow me to explain.

In 2017, when Australia beat India in Pune - it was on a raging turner. The result was a lottery.

In 2021, when England beat India in Chennai - it was on a flat deck that could have been forgiven as the Bengaluru-Chennai expressway. The result again was a foregone conclusion after England batted first.

But this match, you bet, was England’s statement of pure arrogance (in a good way) to play the way they wished to and still force the Indian team into submission. Talk about reducing a 190-run deficit in the first innings to secure a victory of this magnitude.

If anything, it was the first conclusion that Bazball has become a way of life.

Bazball is not about playing only attacking strokes but it is about having clarity in every single episode of the game and never being afraid of employing it. It is also about camaraderie and coordination. All of it was on show in Hyderabad. 

First up, the brave team selection. It doesn’t always happen that England play a Test with only one pacer and three spinners in a match - even if we leave out Joe Root’s off-spin out of context. Bringing in Tom Hartley and Rehan Ahmed, despite the duo accounting for a total of nine Test wickets between them earlier, was a bold call. Hartley, for instance, was a first-class greenhorn with no quality or substance to back his credentials. He was brought into the squad purely because of his height factor. 

Then the batting approach. When England had to bat again after trailing by 190 runs to India’s first-innings total, any other England team of the past would have succumbed under pressure. But this team, under Ben Stokes, weren’t to be. 

They structured their path brick by brick. Ben Duckett attacked from the beginning. Even when Joe Root and Jonny Bairstow couldn’t manage to deliver the goods, Pope was determined to repay the trust posed by the management. He found support from unlikely sources as India were left with no plans but trusting Jasprit Bumrah’s reverse swing to bring about a change.

Unlike England, who went ahead with a 5-4 field set in the second innings, attacking India’s defense in an infallible show of brevity, India’s fielders were looking around at the deep, just waiting for the genie to magically show up and gift them a wicket. Ashwin would much rather let a ball go to the boundary than run fast; slip fielders were making it a habit of letting the ball go past them to the boundary, with an incredibly lethargic KL Rahul adding to the problem. 

Indian fielders’ shoulders didn’t drop because England were scoring runs but because they had no plans to counter them. Even someone like Ashwin, who is always up for a challenge, had no idea of the correct length against Hartley. How would you justify that?

England won in Hyderabad because Bazball clearly worked for them. In the lead up to the tournament, when the side decided to do a 10-day boot camp in Abu Dhabi instead of playing a warm-up game in India, the preparation was criticized by many as a false sense of security. Steve Harmison wished them to lose the series 5-0 to learn a lesson, but Stokes defended the plan by saying building trust and mental security was more important for them than playing hardcore cricket. Hasn’t it worked perfectly for them?

While delving into tactics and numbers too much, we sometimes lose sight of the intangible factors that help cricket teams grow. The culture of Bazball has just proven that in the modern game, there is definitely more space for a free-flowing spirit, keeping the team culture ahead of everything else and leaving no trace of self-doubt regarding perceived abilities. 

A culmination of that is Bazball and it clearly works.