RIP, again, to the remains of Bazball

It was an idea so dead that they’ve had to bury it twice. Please, England supporters will be thinking, let’s not have a third funeral.

This winter the West Australian newspaper mocked up the front-page obituary for English cricket from 1882 – the one that gave birth to the Ashes. “In Affectionate Remembrance of Bazball, which died at Adelaide Oval on 21 December, 2025,” it gloated. “Deeply lamented by Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes, but basically no one else.”

Where Australia led we followed. Elegies spread across English media outlets as the West Australian exulted in their team “beating the woeful Poms in just three matches and 11 days of cricket”.

With head bowed, English cricket recalled how much fun Bazball had been in its early days, then tossed a handful of soil on its remains. Back home, McCullum (head coach) and Rob Key (managing director) fought to keep their jobs. They survived on a promise of what Whitehall folk call “learnings”.

But like Dracula, Bazball has proved hard to kill. It rose again in the place where it was born: Trent Bridge, the scene in 2022 of a Jonny Bairstow thrashathon as England chased down 299 in 50 overs against… New Zealand, who saw Bazball born and witnessed its second death last weekend.

Some among that victorious touring side laughed and asked each other, “what are they doing?” as England’s batters followed Stokes’s lead and treated their wickets like disposable paper cups. The man who would-be captain now that Stokes has quit explained it in a way that suggests he should be nowhere near the armband.

This is how Harry Brook characterised his manic nine-ball knock of 21 in England’s second innings: “Obviously it didn’t come off. Stokesy played a hell of an innings, it was cool watching him go out there and let loose. My role was to go out and try to do a similar thing. Unfortunately it didn’t come off, on another day it could have done.”

“On another day” is telling. This wasn’t another day. It was the day England were 1-1 in a series and needed to save it. Taking his cue from Stokes, who had his own reasons for promoting himself to opener, and trying to reverse ramp the second ball of the innings, Brook detached himself from the facts of the match and the needs of his team and threw himself into the mosh pit.

Here the delusion showed itself above all as a state of mind, a ready-baked excuse, an exemption from accountability.

England didn’t play Bazball throughout the three-Test series against New Zealand. Ben Duckett, for example, shifted his game closer to conventional red-ball discipline. But in the mayhem of Stokes’s retirement announcement, at the least appropriate moment imaginable (at 3.25pm, on day four of a five-day contest), England regressed not into a tactical aberration so much as a conceit: the discredited see-it-hit-it, zero-consequence anti-thinking that was supposed to have been buried in Australia.

They turned back into a cult. And the problem for the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) now is that their decision to leave McCullum and Key in place after the Ashes went back at Trent Bridge to appearing naive. At best McCullum comes across as ambivalent about initiating change.

The curfew violation by Stokes and Gus Atkinson might seem a triviality now but it blew a hole in England’s so-called “reset” (you can see why the ECB had to uphold a rule Stokes himself had helped to draft, however badly worded or unrealistic it was).

A personal suspicion is that Stokes developed a low opinion of some of his teammates. In Australia he lamented having “weak men” around him and by the end seemed tired of having to supply all the intestinal fortitude.

Brook is 27. His last Test century was against India 12 months ago.  To elevate someone who was given a final conduct warning and £30,000 fine for a violent nightclub incident only last November would only suggest the louche thinking of Bazball endures.

Which is why so many senior figures want to see power pass to Andy Flower (as coach) and Alec Stewart (manager). Flower and Stewart are the kind of authority figures you would put money on to purge the self-absorption and restore accountability. Instability, though, runs so deep that some are touting Marcus North to be promoted from head selector to managing director (note, North was made head selector on 13 May – 54 days ago).

Overcorrection is a risk. Nobody wants soporific Test cricket. Nor is it viable anymore. The 11 wins in 13 Tests with which Bazball announced itself were red and white ball cricket walking each other down the aisle. A moribund Test team was revitalised, an endangered format recast as audaciously thrilling.

But to anyone who wants Bazball to continue you might reply by simply saying: Daryl Mitchell. When New Zealand needed him to, Mitchell used himself as a dartboard, turning his body black and blue under bombardment in a six-and-a-half-hour innings that won the series for New Zealand.

Then out marched Stokes and Brook to have some fun. But losing stupidly isn’t fun. Nor is hiding behind defunct ideas, as Brook still is. With a Test series against Pakistan looming, two RIPs are already one too many.

Photograph by Philip Brown/Getty Images