What actually is Bazball? It’s not what the Aussies think it is and it could be a cult…

Dave Tickner 17 Nov 2025

Brendon McCullum licking his lips with The Ashes urn pictured (inset)

The Aussies' idea of Bazball is all wrong, but it's not entirely their fault

What is Bazball? We ask, because we don’t think the idea that Australians have in their heads and that annoys them is actually quite right.

And to be unusually fair to Australians, that’s because most English assessments of Bazball aren’t quite right either…

Most people when they think of Bazball think of fast-scoring batting that is either thrillingly attacking or dangerously reckless. Very often both, opinion lurching violently from one to the other in the middle of a series, a Test, a session, an over.

But the way England bat isn’t itself Bazball. It’s an outcome of Bazball, or if you want to be pejorative about it, a symptom.

Bazball is an idea. Bazball is a state of mind. Bazball is, when you boil it down, a bit of a cult. (And as an aside that might be the most checked and double-checked sentence we’ve ever written.)

Or certainly cult-adjacent. The batting might be the most visible product of the Bazball mentality but it’s not the only one. There’s an argument to be made that it’s very often even more apparent in the field – especially as England no longer possess a couple of all-time great bowlers to help paper over cracks.

England have, by any reasonable definition, a pretty mediocre bowling attack. But they can still do damage.

It’s easy to look at someone like Zak Crawley as the biggest winner of Bazball, and he’s up there, but your Shoaib Bashirs are contenders too, a bowler who has been so thoroughly backed and, to his credit, delivered results that might not be entirely compelling but still exist way beyond anything that could be reasonably expected from his first-class career.

Bazball is an idea of what could happen. And it requires, and has received from the players, absolute buy-in.

The players are not interested in even the most logical rebuttals to Bazball’s excesses, like for instance, ‘You would have won the Ashes if you hadn’t declared like absolute maniacs on day one of the first Test’.

Bazball is the ultimate example of having to take the good with the bad. Because it is impossible to have Bazball and not have it make humongous great howling mistakes every now and then; it’s baked into the concept.

But while England have made come concessions to honing and optimising the idea it also requires great care. Because to even admit that mistakes have been made is to allow to creep back in the very doubt that Bazball seeks to dispel.

And that could make the whole thing fall.

Perfection will never be achieved with Bazball, nor should it

It isn’t perfect, it will never be perfect, and if you try and make it perfect there’s a near certainty you’ll make the whole thing fall apart.

The Bazball mentality is often the reason that things go wrong from wonderful positions for England, but more often than not it’s also the thing that got England into such a position in the first place.

The collapse in the chase against India in the final Test of the summer is a near-perfect example of that. The certainties of the Bazball belief system made England think they could win when it looked impossible; those same certainties then tricked England into thinking they couldn’t lose.

But at its heart Bazball is concerned with thinking not of what might go wrong but what might go right. What if I fall? Ah, but what if you fly? It’s an intoxicating way of thinking, delivering great highs and crushing lows.

It is one that equalises outcomes, and that’s what makes it dangerous for Australia. England should and probably will lose this series, but being high on Bazball gives them more of a chance than dreary reality implies because it’s self-fulfilling.

This, we think, is why Australians are so rattled by it. They know that Bazball’s claims might often be infuriatingly outlandish, but the confidence it gives England’s players is very real. England definitely have a better chance over the next six weeks with Bazball than without.

But it is also an idea inevitably beset by nonsense. Its one that inevitably favours a tantalising unknown over a humdrum known. It’s why players often entirely theoretical ceilings are considered more important than their known floors. And, indeed, flaws.

It’s why the idea of Jacob Bethell appeals more than the reality of Ollie Pope.

And, until this series, there has never actually been a compelling need for Bazball to deliver any specific outcome. That’s what makes this series such a fascinating examination of the whole idea.

Bazball meets The Ashes

This is the series where Bazball’s high-concept ideas crash into brutal Australian reality. This series doesn’t necessarily mark an end to the McCullum-Stokes era, but it definitely marks the culmination of what these last few years have been about. This series, righting 15 years of wrongs.

What Bazball definitely isn’t is a myth. Another misdirected Aussie attack line is that it’s just ‘attacking cricket’ and people have done that before – notably Australia themselves.

It is more than that, and not just in the extremes of its basic run-rate stats and recalibrating of what is possible in a run-chase. England’s results under Bazball are demonstrably and vastly better than the results from the last couple of years before it.

But what Bazball believes to be true – and what it causes others to believe to be true? That can be and often is entirely mythical.

Cook, Crawley and the Bazball philosophy

There was a conversation on the Stick to Cricket podcast recently in which Alastair Cook’s match-winning ability was discussed.

Cook, who scored almost 12,500 Test runs and made 33 centuries – including one on each of Australia’s five main Test grounds, three of them during England’s only Ashes series win down there in the last 40 years – couldn’t ‘win matches on [his] own’.

Or so the argument went. Other players can do that, you see. ‘Harry Brook can, Zak Crawley, Kevin Pietersen.’

Now if we were Alastair Cook, we’d be pretty p*ssed off at having our Test match-winning ability compared unfavourably to that of Zak Crawley.

The humdrum reality of Crawley is that, across a 59-match career, he has only scored two Test centuries in England wins.

And in both those games the other two members of England’s top three also both scored centuries. He has never won any match for England ‘on his own’ no matter how much artistic licence that term is given.

But the idea of Crawley doing it is so compelling, his high, yet so rarely touched ceiling such a core belief of the Bazball philosophy, that his largely theoretical ability to win matches for England is far more important than the fact he never actually does do it.

There is, while we’re at it, a player in England’s top three who actually does do exactly what Bazball requires us to believe of Crawley. A player who can endure long runs of lean form but when it all comes together churns out a startling and often match-winning century.

But that guy is Pope, and everyone wants him dropped for Bethell because he has the more exciting potential to do the sort of thing that Pope does in most series.

And just in case you hadn’t already worked out just how pervasive the tenets of Bazball have become, how thoroughly it now colours the thinking – for good and bad – in and around this England team, the damn fool comparing serial Ashes winner Alastair Cook’s match-winning ability unfavourably to Zak Crawley was, of course, Alastair Cook.