Kit Harris previews Bloomsbury’s latest cricket book.
The foundations were laid in less than a month. In April 2022, Rob Key was brought in as the ECB’s new managing director of men’s cricket. Within four weeks, he had appointed Ben Stokes as Test captain, and Brendon McCullum as head coach. A month more, and England had started winning again: Bazball was born. Its first 18 Tests yielded 13 wins.
The previous regime (Ashley Giles, Chris Silverwood and Joe Root) had been in harness for more than three years; their last 17 Tests brought 11 defeats, and just one victory . They had played things straight, just like their predecessors. Nothing fancy. There never was – save for Bodyline, and the heady summer of 2005.
Bazball: The inside story of a Test cricket revolution is the latest cricket book from Bloomsbury. Its writers, Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack editor Lawrence Booth and Daily Telegraph cricket correspondent Nick Hoult, have spoken to very nearly every player selected in Stokes’s team, to find the secret of what makes Bazball tick.
The secret, it turns out, is to understand what makes the players tick. The book gives us four chapters of backstory: three on Bazball’s architects – the director, captain and coach – and one on the team they inherited. Then, revealingly, comes an interview with Mike Brearley, England’s last truly great Test captain – until Stokes, that is. Now a psychoanalyst, Brearley speculates how the England management have rediscovered the art of getting the best out of people.
Motivation – inspiration, even – comes in two forms. Treating people like adults, and removing the fear of failure. Easier said than done, of course, but this book explains how three relentlessly positive man-managers made it happen.
Everyone, even a tailender, plays a part in Bazball, and five chapters take us through the team: the openers, the middle order, the keepers, seamers, and spinners. Themes emerge. One is a sense of renaissance: we learn just how close Stokes came to giving up his England career at the end of the 2019 World Cup, through disillusionment with the ECB. He was brought back from the brink by those round him – and has never stopped paying it forward. After he hit Worcestershire’s 19-year-old spinner Josh Baker for 34 in a Championship over in 2022, Stokes messaged him with words of reflection and encouragement. Baker’s astonishment that anyone in Stokes’s position would think to contact him says as much about Stokes as it does about those who went before. All who come under his shadow are brought under his wing. “I’d run through a brick wall for him” is, not surprisingly, another theme.
So is joy. Where fear retreated, joie de vivre abounded, almost everywhere. The one exception appears to be Ben Foakes, who has perhaps not found the spark contagious. In contrast to his team-mates, his words are of self-doubt, of needing reassurance, of preferring support from specialist coaches.
This book is not relentlessly positive; it also sounds a note of caution. Two enemies lurk, awaiting their moment. There are England supporters who dislike Bazball for its flashiness, its supposed lack of respect for the game. As Jonny Bairstow puts it in the book: “We’re generally quite a negative nation… and this is a very un-English way of playing.” Defeats, though no longer commonplace, are met with the derision usually reserved for a team that fail continually.
Supporters of other teams, especially those with a claim on superiority of style, are also waiting for the method to fail. Bazball is the cricketing manifestation of Tall Poppy Syndrome, and the talk of “saving Test cricket” irritates many non-English fans. They want Tests to become more popular – as long as it’s not as a result of anything the England team do. Test cricket needs a saviour, just not you. How strange this attitude is – and how very English.
But the England team will be undeterred – even if they lose in India. Quite right, too, for the changes have been as successful as they have been numerous. Some seem obvious: the book has a telling moment when Anderson and Broad recall their delight at learning that, from now on, England would be picking the strongest available team, with the aim of winning the next match. Some are freeing, such as the abolition of the team huddle, or the nine o’clock call time on the morning of a match. Others are, to the devotee of Test cricket, faintly terrifying. The nightwatchman trying to his first ball for six? That wasn’t all, we learn. During a game at Trent Bridge, McCullum told Broad to pad up and go in next – England were two down, and it was three in the afternoon – to “get the crowd roaring”. This seems madness to a cricket hack. But, as this book proves time and again, they were right, and we were wrong.
Bazball: The inside story of a Test cricket revolution is available now. View the book here.
Kit Harris is Assistant Editor of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack.
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