Inventive India learn their lessons quickly to out-Bazball England

Bazball. Since it entered the cricket lexicon, no word has divided the sport so much. No one seems to agree on what that means, but it's actually not that hard to figure out if you've followed England since Brendon McCullum took over as Test coach.

They appear to have recognized that English cricket produces many skilled attacking hitters and few traditional Test match players, and decided to make the best of the situation. They supported the attack of young hitters like Ben Duckett, Zak Crawley, Ollie Pope and Harry Brook, and the attack of older heads like Jonny Bairstow and Ben Stokes, and encouraged them to hit in their natural style: recognizing which are their best modes of attack. , practice them diligently and play these shots with complete freedom, knowing that low scores will not put their places in danger. In playing this way, England have compromised between a higher scoring rate and shorter innings, believing that when it works well it gives their bowlers more time to take 20 wickets in a Test match.

It’s Bazball – or at least an essential part of it. It's a simple concept, and it remains so, if we ignore the many-headed chameleon it has become in the broader discourse. Like any other concept in cricket, it has advantages and disadvantages, and like any other cricket philosophy adopted by Test match teams, it deserves to be taken seriously, whether it produces victories or defeats at a given moment.

India certainly took Bazball seriously. If they are one of the great Test teams, it is not just because they are blessed with some of the best batters, fast bowlers and spinners in the world. It’s also because they are adaptable. They respect their opposition and work hard to find ways to beat them. Here's how they came from behind to beat Bazball 4-1.

Traditional Indian pitches, no square turners
Last year, when India played three successive Tests against Australia on pitches where the ball turned sharply from day one, their coach Rahul Dravid highlighted a global trend for bowler-friendly pitches, born from the need to get as many points as possible in the World Test Championship. .

“Every team is getting results at home or performing really well at home, so results are important,” Dravid said. “You get four points for a draw and you get 12 for a win, so there’s a premium on that, there’s no doubt about it.”

The WTC points structure has not changed in this cycle, and Dravid remains India's coach, but India have moved away from square turners in this series against England. For what? Well, because Bazball.

When this series began it was clear that India had by far the best bowling attack for Indian conditions, and that England, who arrived with four spinners three of whom had previous Test caps between them, had a particularly weak attack even by standards. recent visiting teams.

It was also clear that India, having left Cheteshwar Pujara and Ajinkya Rahane and missing Virat Kohli, who was out for personal reasons, would start the series with the less experienced batting line-up of the two teams. For that alone, it made sense for them to prepare pitches that protected their batters a little while still allowing their bowlers' superior skills and experience to shine through.

But the nature of Bazball must also be taken into account. Hitters who take frequent risks can end up defying the odds and putting up big scores in all kinds of conditions. But it's more likely that one or two random offensive rounds will make the difference in the outcome of a shorter fight on a raging returner than a longer fight on flat ground. This was the idea that prompted India to give Suryakumar Yadav his Test debut against Australia last year.

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With an English team full of Suryakumars, India chose to prolong the competition and ask the opposition to take risks for longer, against the superior attack.

So it's not entirely a coincidence that England's only victory, and their closest defeat, came on the two toughest batting pitches of the series, at Hyderabad and Ranchi.

Stop Singles
Of course, pitch preparation is not an exact science. A flat pitch – at least compared to those in last year's Australian series – can deteriorate and make a fourth-inning chase extremely tricky, even against an inexperienced spinning attack. And a haphazard innings can last a very, very long time: Pope survived 72 false shots while scoring 196 in his match-defining third innings in Hyderabad. England's victory in Hyderabad was, in many ways, an anomalous result.

But India still had knowledge to imbibe. As good as their spinners were, they were still playing in front of a Bazball line-up for the first time, still finding the best way to react to a batter's reverse sweep as often and as skillfully as Pope did in Hyderabad.

R Ashwin, Ravindra Jadeja and Axar Patel probably could have done two things differently against Pope. They could, for example, have been stubborn with their length rather than reactive – they gave away a few scoring shots without risk while trying to go further and chase down the heavyweights. And they could have been less responsive with their domains.

One of the key statistics for Hyderabad was the percentage of runs scored in singles, with England (36.61) doing slightly better than India (35.99) on this measure.

This has changed dramatically in Visakhapatnam and Rajkot. England seemed to temper their batting approach thereafter, but India continued to win the singles battle even in Ranchi and Dharamshala. This allowed their bowlers to keep the batters on strike for longer, establish a better rhythm and continue to create chances.

Continue to adjust your plans
India's willingness to abandon boundaries in a bid to protect singles was evident from the first innings in Rajkot. On the second day, after Ben Duckett took to India's bowling with a bold century, Ashwin spoke about bowlers judging themselves purely on their processes.

“[…] I wouldn't be too upset because they couldn't hit me in different places [of the ground]this is what will [worry me]”, Ashwin said. “I am clear about choosing where to take risks, so that I always play my best balls.”

Ashwin and Kuldeep Yadav, both diverting their ball away from the left-hand batter, spent long periods bowling without a deep mid-wicket, even when Duckett swept them frequently.

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That changed on the morning of the third day, when Kuldeep shifted to a more defensive mode, throwing a wider line to Duckett with a deep mid-off. He reduced his chances of getting Duckett to bowl or lbw, but asked the batter to play differently: either avoid the slog-sweep, or take a greater risk by playing it, collecting it from outside off-stump, against the turn, with a defensive player in place for the missed shot.

The plan worked – not so much in the way Duckett ultimately fell, but in controlling his score and allowing Kuldeep to build a fascinating rhythm through a match-altering 12-over spell. The sweep-defying wide line also worked on the first morning in Dharamsala, where Kuldeep found his edge to give India their first breakthrough.

This was just one example of how the Indian bowlers grew over the series and gradually took over the Bazball. England's spinners had a better collective average for the series than their Indian counterparts after the second Test, but India's quality ultimately showed. And how. By the end of the series, the Indian spinners had taken 69 wickets between them at 24.86 and England's 60 at 39.16.

Five bowlers, always
This has been written about before, but it bears mentioning once again: India resolutely stuck to a five-bowler strategy and picked their five best bowlers even when they had the option to cover their bets with an additional versatile player. It helped them, of course, that so many of their spinners were genuine all-rounders in their home conditions, and that the least talented batter among their spinners, Kuldeep, had transformed into an admirably heavyweight lower-order contributor .

Despite this, despite the inexperience of their top order, they made the brave decision to continue playing their best five available bowlers, and the results were clear.

There were times during the series – particularly the second innings at Rajkot and Ranchi, and the two innings at Dharamsala – when England collapsed as they appeared to hit neither Bazball nor in a non-Bazball way. It wasn't because they had lost their skills or their ability to plan; it was a result of the sustained pressure they were under from the Indian bowlers, with no weak link to act as a pressure valve.

Don't copy the Bazballers (or better copy them)
In the first two Tests, the Indian batters often looked like they were letting run-scoring runs go unscored. This was illustrated on day two in Hyderabad, when a series of their batters fell to attacking shots from spinners, with none of their top five falling to traditional dismissal modes: bowled, in weight, caught by goalkeeper, slide or bat-pad. .

According to data from ESPNcricinfo, almost 56% of the wickets taken by England bowlers in Hyderabad came from aggressive shots by Indian batters. England's batters lost only 25% of their wickets due to aggressive shots.

This changed over time, with India forcing bowlers to “win” more of their wickets as the series progressed – double quotes because big hits are not always unforced errors – and England being more and forced to take seemingly unreasonable risks.

You can read this two ways. England's methods, one might say, caused India to try and surpass them, before they learned their lessons and began to trust their own ways. Or one could say that India learned, over the course of the series, to stop the Bazball – to block its batters' favored scoring lanes and force them to take, as it were, riskier risks – while at the same time revealing their own risks. version of Bazball – refine their risk-taking, take stronger and more timely risks. After all, they hit 72 sixes to England's 30.

Maybe it was true after all. Bazball had taught India how to win.