Andy Zaltzman on what we’ve learned so far
From June 2022, when the Stokes-McCullum Bazballistic era of English cricket began, until December 2024, when their most recent series concluded, the overall scoring rate in Test cricket was 3.59 runs per over.
Twelve teams played Tests in that time. Eleven scored at a below-average rate. Only England – 4.61 per over – exceeded the collective average. India, the second-fastest-scoring side, scored at 3.58.
What do we learn from this? Firstly, that statistics are malleable and pliant. If we extend the sample until the end of the 2024-25 international season, Australia, who have played three Tests since New Year, sneak fractionally above the overall average.
England have played 35 Tests since the Stokesian revolution commenced, comfortably more than any other team, which unbalances the data.
However, why sully the joyous purity of a stat when its essential point remains the same – that England’s cricket over the past three years has been some of the most extraordinary in the history of the sport?
Under Stokes and McCullum, England have produced a cocktail of giddy successes, striking failures, brilliance, frustration, fascination, genuine strategic novelty in a format approaching its 150th birthday, and, for those who enjoy such things, an unquenchable Vesuvius of statistics.
Most of these stats have been positive. England’s 4.6-an-over batting pyrotechnics, for example, are without precedent.
Previously, no team had ever scored at more than 4 per over a 35-Test stretch, and before the turn-of-the-millennium Australians, no team had even scored at 3.5 per over across 35 matches.
In the 35 Bazball Tests, England have conceded runs at 3.47 per over. They have scored 32.6 per cent faster than their opponents, another unparalleled margin.
The largest runs-per-over percentage difference any Test team had achieved over a 35-Test sequence was 30.8 per cent (Australia, from 1931 to 1946, when they scored at 3.03 and conceded at 2.31). Some stats are less flattering. In 2024, six of England’s defeats involved them batting for a total of fewer than 666 balls, to pick a random devil-related number out of the cricketing ether.
They suffered only one such defeat in 410 Tests between March 1910 and July 1976, and only four from July 1986 to June 2001, an era with a plentiful supply of clattering England defeats. The overall results have been excellent – 22 wins, 12 defeats, and only one draw, the rain-interrupted, slow-over-rate-aggravated stalemate at Old Trafford in the 2023 Ashes.
Allowing for heavy statistical lifting by Bazball’s staggering first year (won 11, lost 2, up to and including the Ireland Test of 2023; won 11, lost 10 since), England have been unusually successful.
Only once since the 19th century have England won more in a 35-match sequence, when they won 23 of 35 from January 2003, a period that encompassed Michael Vaughan leading England to victory in the West Indies and South Africa, seven wins out of seven in the 2004 summer, and culminated in the nerve-mangling victory at Trent Bridge in the 2005 Ashes.
‘The next nine months promise to be the most fascinating in England history’
As is often noted, England had won only one of the last 17 Tests before the Stokes-McCullum era. As is less frequently noted, before that 17-match slump, Joe Root’s team had won 21 of their previous 33 Tests, at which point Root had the second highest win percentage of the 18 England players who had captained in at least 20 Tests.
Stokes, the 19th man on that list, now sits at its top, with 19 wins in 32 Tests, and Root has fallen to seventh. Win percentage is, admittedly, a fickle statistic, given the highly successful global project to hunt the Test match draw to the point of extinction. (In terms of win:loss ratio, Stokes is ninth, Root 14th.) Draws bred uncontrollably in the free-love-addled 1960s – proliferating to such an extent that, in that decade, England drew 53 of 100 Test matches. Test cricket was slipping into a potentially incurable coma of caution. A humane cull of draws was justified and necessary.
(To give context to these numbers, at a rate of one draw per 35 Tests, in order to match England’s total draws from the 1960s, Stokes’s team would have to play 1,855 matches, which, if they maintain their current schedule of about 12 games per year, would take until the second Test of the 2179-80 series against Muskania (formerly South Africa).)
Bazball, while broadly welcomed and appreciated, has split cricketing opinion. It has been a cricketing Rorschach test. In a psychoanalyst’s inkblot, some see a butterfly opening its wings. Others perceive a vengeful badger wrestling a penguin in an unkempt hedge. And some see the silhouette of Root easing one through the covers off the back foot with a high front elbow and an ethereal economy of movement.
So it is with Bazball. Some see strategic boldness, intended to instil freedom in the players and to discomfort opponents with an unfamiliar challenge. Others see a carelessness bordering on arrogance that donates exploitable weaknesses to the opposition.
Our interpretations perhaps reveal more about ourselves than anything else. In terms of Bazball’s impact on the Test game as a whole, it’s too soon to draw definitive conclusions. No other team have jolted their scoring rate up as dramatically as England, but the overall rate of the other sides has risen by a significant amount – 3.42 since the start of the 2022 season, up from 3.07 in the three previous years, having been 3.22 across the 10 years before that.
The next nine months, with series against India and in Australia, each confronting Stokes’s England in a full series for the second time, promise to be one of the most fascinating periods in England’s Test history. Perceptions will be challenged and clarified. There will be intense, prolonged bouts of opinion tennis. The cricket will be captivating. And, whatever happens, there will be stats.
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