Why It Broke Abroad
At home, England under Stokes were almost unbeatable. Away, they were hammered 4–1 twice. The same approach that thrilled in an English summer kept walking into the same traps — and the critics who saw it coming turned out to be half right.
By Kishan Thesiya · 10 min read
At home, England under Ben Stokes were close to unbeatable. Away from home, twice, they were taken apart. They lost 4–1 in India in 2024, and 4–1 in Australia in the 2025–26 Ashes, the tour that finally wore Stokes down. Any honest account of Bazball has to begin there, because the gap between the home record and the away record is the clearest clue to what the method could and could not do.
The warnings came early
The doubts were not invented after the fact. From almost the first month, opponents queued up to say the same thing: this would work until it met real pace and real movement. After India's seamer Mohammed Siraj bowled England out cheaply, he was blunt about it. Every one of their quicks bowled at ninety miles an hour, he said, and England had nothing like that coming back the other way. South Africa's captain Dean Elgar, a hard man raised on the idea that you give the bowlers nothing, went further. He saw no longevity in brave cricket, he said, and reckoned it could go south very quickly. Even Geoffrey Boycott, no enemy of a good time, warned that you cannot bat like that against top-class bowling without coming a cropper somewhere.
They got their evidence fast. When South Africa came to Lord's in 2022, their excellent pace pair, Kagiso Rabada and Anrich Nortje, simply blew England away, bowling them out for 165 and 149 inside three days. England recovered to win the series, and McCullum, true to his word, told them to go harder rather than rein it in. But the warning had been logged. On a pitch with pace and sideways movement, against bowlers who hit the splice, the percentages that made attack the sensible option at home started to shift.
The short-ball trap
The clearest sign of the blind spot came at Lord's in the 2023 Ashes. Australia worked out that England, told to attack, would attack even when attacking was the wrong call. So they banged the ball in short, packed the leg-side field, and waited. England obliged, holing out one after another, and threw away a strong position. This time the loudest criticism came from England's own press: one writer called it not Bazball but brainless, English cricket's remake of the Charge of the Light Brigade.
Michael Vaughan made the sharpest point. All England had to do, he wrote, was duck under a few. Australia would soon have dropped the bouncer plan, because bowling it for hours is back-breaking work. Getting under the short ball and seeing off the spell was the harder, braver option. Attacking, in that moment, was the easy reflex dressed up as courage. That was the naivety in a sentence: treating aggression as a rule to be obeyed rather than a choice to be judged.
There was a quieter cost to playing so loose, as well. In the first two Ashes Tests of 2023 England dropped catches and bowled no-balls at telling moments — the kind of slack details that decide tight matches, and that a more buttoned-up side might not have shed.
Wellington: the one they gave away
The most painful example came in New Zealand, early in 2023. At Wellington, England were 226 runs ahead and enforced the follow-on, the bold and old-fashioned move, rather than calmly batting again to squeeze the life out of the game. New Zealand batted beautifully second time around, set England a modest target, and bowled them out one run short. England became only the fourth team in the history of Test cricket to lose a match after asking the other side to follow on. It was thrilling to watch. It was also, on a cold reading, a Test they handed over by choosing drama over control.
One gear
Underneath the individual defeats sat one repeating problem: England really only had a single gear. The approach that overwhelmed teams in an English summer left them predictable everywhere else. In India in 2024 the ball gripped and turned, and the situation called for patience; England kept trying to dominate, were picked off, and lost 4–1. In Australia in 2025–26 the pitches were quick and the bowling never let up; again England answered by doing more of the same, and again they lost 4–1. A side with only one setting is the easiest thing in the world to plan against, and good attacks duly planned.
This is the charge that sticks. It is one thing to back a method; it is another to keep playing it unchanged on a surface that is begging you to adapt. The very conviction that made England fearless at home made them slow to accept, away, that the conditions had changed the sum.
Stubborn, or brave?
The fair way to hold all this is to see that the strength and the weakness were the same thing. The refusal to play scared won England matches no previous English side would have won. That same refusal, in the wrong conditions, tipped into stubbornness, and once or twice into something close to arrogance — a team, as Boycott put it, that had started to believe its own publicity. When the approach came off, it looked fearless. When it didn't, it looked reckless. The line between the two was always thin, and Stokes spent four years walking along it.
None of this, though, stopped the players believing in him. Through every away hammering and every brainless half-hour, the dressing room kept running through walls for Stokes. To understand why, you have to understand what he had been through to get there.