There’s a moment every sporting philosophy reaches its breaking point.
For the England cricket team, that moment arrived somewhere between sitting seventh place on the World Test Championship table and yet another series that felt less like genuine competition and more like a farewell tour of Australia.
A chance for all Aussie and English fans alike to say goodbye to the death of ‘Bazball’.
Three games, three losses, to what was initially labelled, Australia’s worst team in decades by many in England.
Well, despite this, and despite the top order turmoil, injuries to two of Australia’s best quicks in skipper Pat Cummins and Josh Hazlewood, Steve Smith missing the third Test entirely, somehow Australia’s second greatest spinner of all time being omitted for a game, and an all-rounder that is terribly out of form.
If you can’t beat that, then who can you beat?
England now sit on just 26 points, that’s half the points of sixth-placed India, and just one place above Bangladesh, who have only played two matches so far (for a draw and a loss). They are a far cry from the competition leaders Australia on 72 points. That is not “reimagining Test cricket”.
It is a failure of structure and governance, from the boardroom to the dressing room.
The obituaries for Bazball are already being written in the English media, and with good reason. What was sold as a rescuing of Test cricket, has collapsed into dogma.
And Australia has been its graveyard. Bazball didn’t just struggle here, it came to Australia to die and there should be a gravestone erected at Adelaide Oval as a fitting tribute to its final nail in the coffin.
This isn’t about losing matches overseas. England have always found touring hard, especially down under. This is about losing an identity that once made England intimidating to the very best in the world. Well, the promise was made that Bazball would ‘save Test cricket’. But the reality is the exact opposite.
Australia’s players celebrate after winning the third Ashes Test. (AP Photo/James Elsby)
Fans do not want two- or three-day Tests decided by reckless shot-making and self-congratulatory press conferences. They want the five-day chess match, the accumulation of pressure, the psychological warfare on batters and bowlers alike that unfolds over sessions and days of Test cricket.
They want the chirping Marnus behind the stumps, trying to get into the head of his foes.
But the dressing room isn’t the only place decisions are made about the team culture and strategy, and this is being overlooked dramatically by the media. Accountability must widen beyond the dressing room, the captain, and the coach (although the latter may not outlast this series, or at least shouldn’t). And the time has come for the autopsy, after just three Tests in the series.
The England and Wales Cricket Board has allowed this experiment to run far beyond its evidence. Seventh in this World Test Championship. Fifth in the 2023–25 cycle. That’s not a blip. That’s a trend, and a profoundly mediocre one.
Fifth and seventh are not positions of transition, they are positions of stagnation. In both cycles, England finished drifting just above Sri Lanka and Bangladesh.
Those are not the traditional heavyweights of world cricket. England’s resources, player depth, domestic structure, and financial muscle should place them firmly in the top tier, not fighting to avoid embarrassment (which they clearly haven’t).
Yet the ECB kept endorsing the narrative. Kept selling the philosophy. Kept allowing results to be explained away as entertainment value. But it is now clear that entertainment without excellence is meaningless. Loss after loss is simply not entertaining for fans.
At some point, the board has to answer a hard question, what exactly was the success metric? Because if the answer isn’t winning consistently across conditions, then the ECB have fundamentally misunderstood what Test cricket demands.
England’s captain Ben Stokes and head coach Brendon McCullum. (AP Photo/Ajit Solanki)
Which brings us to the uncomfortable conclusion.
This team needs a genuine rebuild, like an AFL team that has just lost a few of its most senior players (in this case, namely Stuart Broad and James Anderson among others). We are talking a full on North Melbourne rebuild.
Not a refresh. Not a tweak. It’s a rebuild. And it begins with leadership.
The coach and captain must go, not as scapegoats, but as a recognition that the strategy has failed and they have nothing left up their sleeve to fall back on. Ben Stokes is a wonderful player and will continue with a long fruitful career, but the captaincy is beyond him.
A rebuild means re-teaching patience and selecting batsmen that are capable of this pinnacle of cricket. It means valuing draws again when necessary for the greater series success. It means selecting bowlers who can grind, batters who can leave, captains who understand that strategy beats power, because power can fail during an Australian storm, as we have just seen yet again.
It also means the ECB stepping back from marketing slogans and recommitting to substance. Bazball didn’t save Test cricket; few thought it would.
But what they need to understand is that Test cricket doesn’t need saving. It needs the respect it is due. If they want to matter again, they’ll need to relearn it, from the boardroom down.
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