Basically, Bazball is all about batting. It is the area of the England squad that is causing the loudest debate. Devastating at its best, the collective failures of England’s batsmen led to their most disastrous defeats.
Take Ben Duckett for example. He is the first English opener to score over 1,000 runs in a calendar year since Alastair Cook in 2016. McCullum’s favorite trope is to point out that successful England openers are knighted. If we exclude Sirs Chef and Andrew Strauss, the last time to break 1,000 in a year was Marcus Trescothick in 2005.
In many respects Duckett was a success, but on the third night at Hamilton he went off the track and impaled Tim Southee on his stump. Perhaps we can’t have one without the other. It’s Bazball in microcosm.
Duckett is not under pressure, his opening partner is. Zak Crawley is to Matt Henry what David Warner was to Broad. Crawley hasn’t reached 30 points in the last 10 shots. Of all players who have at least 84 first-overs in Test cricket, as is the case with Crawley, only former Zimbabwe batsman Grant Flower has a worse average than Crawley’s 29.59.
England are all-in on Crawley. Like a broken clock that shows the correct time twice a day, they are counting on his time in the match against India and Australia. Given what he did to them at Old Trafford in 2023, Australia would be quite happy if Crawley isn’t out of Perth next year.
The image below of Crawley, England’s Ashes may have been shaped by a man born in Surrey playing for New Zealand.
Will O’Rourke’s terrifying performance on day four in Hamilton was everything England can expect in Australia. Pace, rebound and hostility. The best way to do it was not Joe Root or Harry Brook, the two best batsmen in the world, but 21-year-old Bethell.
In his three Tests, Bethell has shown a calmness from the first drop that Ollie Pope would have loved. Ahead of the Wellington Test, Stokes said he expected Pope to return to third place for the home summer. After Hamilton, McCullum had the opportunity to support Pope, only to say that Bethell had given England a “headache”. The rhetoric has changed.
