Can Anyone Else Do This?

From almost the first month, every opponent asked the same question: this is fun, but will it work against us, in our conditions? Now that it is over, there is a bigger version of the same question. Was Bazball a one-off, the right men in the right place at the right time, or a genuinely new way to play Test cricket that others can pick up?

What it took to work#

Start with what had to line up for it to happen at all, because it rarely does. You need the right players: a group raised in the Twenty20 era whose instinct is to score, not to survive. You need a board patient enough to hold its nerve through the losses. McCullum was handed a four-year contract and the backing of a rich governing body, which let him fail early without being sacked. And you need a culture, right down to the crowd, that can stomach losing in the particular way this method risks. England, in 2022, happened to have all three at once.

Take any one of them away and it falls over. "Failing is fine" is only true if the people above you mean it when you actually fail. England's players could throw the bat because they knew, with total certainty, that Stokes and McCullum would back them the next morning. Most cricketers, in most countries, have never had that promise, and never will.

Why it didn't travel#

So did it spread? Honestly, not much, and the away record in Part 3 is the proof: beaten 4–1 in India, 4–1 in Australia. The sharpest explanation came, before any of it had happened, from India's Ravichandran Ashwin. Suppose India tried this, he said: suppose a batter threw his hands at everything, like Harry Brook, and India lost two Tests doing it. What then? They would drop four players. The selectors, the culture, even the crowd would not absorb the losses the method asks you to risk. It works for England, he said, because the management, the selectors and the public are all in on it. You can't just copy a style because it worked for someone else.

Mike Atherton put the same thought more gently. There is no going back for England under Stokes, he said, but other countries should play to the talent they actually have; if you don't have the players for it, it would be foolish to try. Where the idea did travel, it travelled as an attitude more than a method. Pakistan adapted fastest, even running batting camps where playing out more than two dot balls in a row cost you your wicket in practice. The mood leaked into other sports too. Football managers, rugby coaches, even management consultants borrowed the language. But borrowing a mood is the easy part. Doing it against a moving ball, on a turning pitch, in a country that punishes failure, is the hard part, and most could not.

The question it forced#

Here is what survives, whatever the win-loss column says. Bazball made the game ask a question it had stopped asking. Michael Vaughan framed it best: which is actually the riskier way to bat in a Test, to attack, or to grind along at two and a half an over and hope? For a hundred years everyone had assumed caution was the safe option, and nobody really checked. England made them check. Kumar Sangakkara, who scored more than 12,000 Test runs the orthodox way, watched it and said he wished he had played with that kind of freedom. That is not nothing.

So, was it worth it?#

Both answers have a case, and the honest verdict holds them together. It was player-dependent and place-dependent. It failed badly away from home. It could be naive, and stubborn, and once or twice arrogant. And it was also thrilling, genuinely new, and it filled grounds and won over a generation of watchers at the exact moment the format looked finished in England. The same trait drove all of it: the refusal to be afraid, which won matches no previous English team would have won, and lost a few a more careful team might have saved.

The numbers bracket the whole experiment. England had won one of seventeen Tests, scoring at under three an over, when Stokes took over. He left as the most successful long-serving captain in their history by win rate. In between sit two 4–1 away hammerings. All of it is the same story.

Stokes himself finishes as one of only two men, with Jacques Kallis, to make 7,000 Test runs and take 250 wickets, reaching the mark in his final match. The fair summary is the mixed one. He took a format that looked finished in his country and made it the most watched thing in its summer, played cricket that was thrilling and new, and got a fair amount wrong along the way. Exciting, aggressive, flawed, a little naive. Not black and white, which is probably why it will be argued about for years.

We once gave a whole series here to a simpler idea: that a Test match is quietly decided by the pitch, and a captain's craft is reading it and bending the game his way. Stokes took that further than anyone. He did not just pick a team to suit the conditions; he changed what eleven players were trying to do once they walked out there. That is the part most likely to outlast him.