How Bazball alters one of the fundamental truths of Test cricket

Joe Root left the field. That's nine balls since his arrival. England shaved 154 runs off their target of 399 runs, the toughest in the Bazball era, in just under 31 overs, including 87 trashed on the fourth morning. Of the three counters lost along the way, one belongs to the night watchman, who used five sumptuous terminals.

Root is England's second most prolific Test batter. He started the Test with more runs than the entire Indian XI, and in the first innings he surpassed India's 1000 Test runs. This is a body of work built on traditionally solid Test match craftsmanship, and in another era it would be natural to expect a batter of Root's pedigree to lay down and throws in pursuit on ground still comfortable for batting.

But they don't do it that way these days, and certainly not Root, who adopted this new fashion with the skill of a late convert. The last nine balls have already fetched him 16 runs, starting with a backwards-swept four off the first ball, from R Ashwin. The third delivery that Root faced produced another attempted reverse sweep that ballooned the glove for a fortuitous four. The seventh over was belted for a six over long on. He is now on the field, observing the leg-side fence, which has not been guarded.

But Ashwin bowls around the wicket. The ball was pushed wide and he goes with the arm. Root is also fooled into stealing, but he is so engaged in the shooting that bailing out is not possible. He finishes the wildest of flails with his bat on his shoulder, pointing towards square leg, head tilted outwards and eyes closed. It was a horror shot that sliced ​​the ball backwards, and the horror was fleetingly visible, like a reflex reaction, on Root's face.

To suggest that this shot encapsulates the essence of Bazball – you hit a lot and miss a few – would only tell half the story. The reward that comes with risk is only part of it, but what makes this approach possible is that failure comes with no recrimination, and therein lies its true genius. In another era, this stroke would have sparked howls of outrage from supporters, and analysts would have considered it the trigger for England's collapse.

The fact that none of this happened illustrates not only how England under Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum have rethought their approach to Test batting, but also how profoundly they have influenced the discourse of the game. It's not just Root and the England team who ignored it as part of the design, but such dismissals of England batting are now so normalized that this one barely registers as a mishap for those who look. It was a demonstration of England's success in co-opting mass perception in its repositioning of Test batting as a bold and valiant pursuit of fast runs whatever the result.

This is a fundamental shift in the texture of Test cricket. Since every ball carries a risk of expulsion, batting is the heaviest sporting activity. The batting test is based on the principle of minimizing risks. The loss of a wicket, especially of a top-order batter, is a massive and decisive event in Tests, unlike in shorter formats, where restricting the number of overs makes batting resources appear relatively abundant.

The liberating effect of removing – or reducing the impact of – the consequences of layoffs is evident in the range of shots in T20 cricket. If the stumps are not taken into account, the crease can become a reference point for positioning for aiming. Getting caught is just an occupational hazard. Hitting upwards is a routine option.

It's not that balls of good length cannot be driven, or that balls cannot be hit square if they are in the line of the stumps, but the test bat is calibrated for preservation . This gives bowlers bigger margins in Test cricket. They can construct spells, formulate plans, set up catchers and string together sequences of balls knowing that the construction and rhythms of Test cricket allow them the space to construct returns. Batting is a process of ongoing risk assessment, but safety standards are set much higher in testing, allowing bowlers a greater margin of deviation from length or perfect line, as hitters tend to wait until balls are close enough to drive them, or short enough to hit them. cut or pull.

Root's ten-ball innings at Visakhapatnam might have seemed reckless from the start, and Harry Brook's baseball-style hitting might give the appearance of a complete disregard for basic batting principles, but the new batting philosophy of England is based on reorienting the mind.

By removing the fear of consequences and retaliation, the English management not only unlocked goalscoring opportunities that have always existed but were not always exploited, but they also presented their opponents with a different challenge. Carefree stroke players have existed throughout the history of the game, and Virender Sehwag is an example of a hitter who achieved devastating success by treating every ball as an opportunity to make a run, but a team in his ensemble rarely took this approach as an approach.

Zak Crawley improved his scoring average by nearly eight points in the Bazball era, not by swinging wildly but by jumping more aggressively on scoring opportunities. No one in this series has left Jasprit Bumrah as confidently as Crawley, and no one has capitalized on marginal errors of length as well as he has. He is the only top-order batter not to have been dismissed by Bumrah in the series so far. In the second Test, he took eight boundaries from him, while the others took nine.

Just as Crawley used his reach to maximize driving opportunities, Ben Duckett, his opening partner, pounced on the slightest offer of width to use his most profitable shot, the cut. It's a small sample size, but Duckett, who was sidelined after four unimpressive Tests in 2016 that gave him a 15.71 average, has scored more than 1,100 points at nearly 50 since he was rehabilitated as an enforcer by the current management. The most notable increase is in his strikeout rate: from 57.89 to 90.06.

The table above is proof that England have not adopted madness (every batter, including Root, improved their average, despite scoring faster) but rather a method designed to maximize their batting potential and disrupt the plans of his adversaries. Alerted to punish each failure, they almost systematically target bowlers whom they consider to be weak links. In Birmingham against India, where they staged their highest chase of that era, Shardul Thakur was taken apart for 113 runs in 18 overs; in the Ashes, Scott Boland, who entered the series with an economy rate of 2.31, was plundered for almost five; Mohammed Siraj went for 5.70 in Tests, and Mukesh Kumar, playing his first Test at home in Vishakhapatnam, was never allowed to settle.

This is uncharted territory for India in more ways than one.

Lately, they have been accustomed to turning teams around on sharp returners, as they did with England in 2020-21. On traditional Indian wickets – like those in this series – they have always possessed the batting power to bury their opponents under the weight of runs, as with England in 2016-17, who lost two Tests by wide margins despite scores of 400 and 477 in the first innings.

This time, handing out rank returners carries the risk of elevating the threat posed by the England rookie's spin attack on India's weakest batting line-up in a home series in living memory. Conversely, flat pitches can enhance England's quick scoring potential, while Indian batting so far has been unable to put games out of reach decisively.

India faces an idea that appears to challenge the fundamentals of Test cricket: a group of batters who give the appearance of kamikaze fighters, even if they are not, and a team that has managed to relieve itself creating the impression that they are somehow winning even if they lose.

All of these elements come together to deliver a fascinating five-Test series between two flawed teams.