Having won just one of their 17 Tests in build-up to the 2022 home summer, England registered four wins on the trot against the inaugural World Test Championship finalists recently, doing so with great audacity and ease.
“I don’t really like that silly term that people are throwing out there,”
Brendon McCullum said on SEN Radio, referring to ‘Bazball’, the most trending cricketing term in recent times.
While the England Test coach stresses that there’s deeper thinking that goes in while executing the aggressive approach on either fronts, he doesn’t deviate from the vision of keeping Test cricket “sexy”, and the motive of “obligation to entertain”.
They gunned down targets of 276, 299, 296 against New Zealand last month at 3.53, 5.98 and 5.44 rpo respectively, before achieving their highest ever of 378 in Tests against India at Edgbaston at 4.93 with seven wickets remaining last week.
Three of those chases would be achieved across the final two days’ play, and England had Stuart Broad padded up on each of those penultimate eves to play a “Nighthawk”, as Ben Stokes reveals.
In stark contrast to the role of a traditional “Night Watchman”, that of surviving the remaining overs of the day’s play, the Nighthawk is meant to go all-out slam-bang against the bowlers. The ideal outcome?
“Thirty off 10. Or zero off one,”
says Stokes.
Quite simple, really! England have the personnel in Jonny Bairstow and Stokes to lead an aggressive outlook in batting, and Joe Root, perhaps in the form of his life can do no wrong, reverse-sweeping the likes of Tim Southee, Neil Wagner and Shardul Thakur over slips in Test match cricket!
England’s overall scoring rate this year stands at 3.76 from nine Tests, their second best in a calendar year since their first ever Test in 1877. On either side of that is 3.81 in 2011 and 3.62 in 2005: the first in a year that saw them emerge as the No.1 ranked team, the latter featuring a fairytale Ashes glory. Notably, it was the effervescent, aggressive Kevin Pietersen playing the protagonist in both.
England have historically triumphed while fighting fire with fire, but it’s amazing that it took them four-and-a-half decades and a premature 2015 World Cup exit to forgo the conventional, safety-first attitude in the ODI format. That realization was brought about by McCullum, who would catalyze Eoin Morgan’s rise to becoming one of white-ball game’s most influential leaders.
It’s tough to imagine that the current England side, which stormed past the inaugural World Test Championship finalists with an insane audacity, had won just one of their last 17 Tests before the start of the season. They had issues top to toe, barring Root’s scarcely believable consistent run, before McCullum stepped in to change the fortunes, this time in company of a “too similar (in nature)” Stokes.
While Bairstow, Root and Stokes have been at the forefront of the batting charge, Alex Lees, a conventional red-ball opener gave brisk starts with 44 and 56 in fourth innings at Trent Bridge and Edgbaston respectively, while admittedly aiming “to hit Ravindra Jadeja for a six first ball.”
Jamie Overton was least unfussed, walking in at 55/6 on his Test debut, scoring a fluent 97 in a brilliant recovery act, in a game he would also dismiss Devon Conway and Tom Lathan. Jack Leach discovered that attacking bowling and spin bowling can reap dividends during his 10-wicket-match haul in Leeds, before having a final laugh against Rishabh Pant in the second innings at Edgbaston, after a ridiculously one-sided duel in the first dig.
That McCullum is at the forefront of it all comes as a no surprise. An inspirational leader, he transformed New Zealand in a formidable outfit after the lows of Cape Town 2013, following which they have won a WTC title and made two World Cup finals, falling agonizingly short by “the barest of margins” in the recent one.
“There’s actually quite a bit of thought that goes into how the guys manufacture their performances and when they put pressure on bowlers and which bowlers they put pressure on. There’s also times where they’ve absorbed pressure beautifully as well,”
he’d attest further after dismissing the ‘Bazball’ term.
That’s him saying: “Though this be madness, yet there is method in ‘t”. That fits perfectly in a country of the men of prose Geoffrey Chaucer and Charles Dickens, and the very idiom’s composer William Shakespeare, the greatest playwright of them all.
That prophecy was evident in Bairstow’s first innings approach at Edgbaston, with him scoring a patient 13 off 61 in the first half of a rearguard act, which would later turn into domination following a verbal with Virat Kohli.
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McCullum knows better than most how to time and pace the innings, a trait his seemingly visible swashbuckling demeanor might overshadow. A man with seven T20 hundreds, most sixes (107) and the fastest ever ton (off 54 balls) in Test cricket, is also New Zealand’s only Test triple centurion in the 458 Tests they have played since 1930.
That innings of 302, spanning nearly 13 hours at the crease, had come at a time when his side was 94/5 – still 152 away from avoiding an innings defeat – against an attack comprising Jadeja, Zaheer Khan, Ishant Sharma, and Mohammed Shami.
England have certainly shown McCullum’s blistering spark in their back-to-back resounding wins, and should they match the resistance and adaptability for sustained periods when the need arises, Stokes’ army could turn into a side to beat.
That aspect would surely be tested when they tour Pakistan later in the ongoing WTC cycle. Whether the success in home comforts inspires glory abroad remains to be seen.
