Why England Batted in Such a Hurry
Ben Stokes retired mid-match at Trent Bridge, burnt out at 35. He leaves behind the most talked-about captaincy in English cricket — and an argument that still isn't settled: what was Bazball really, and did it actually work?
By Kishan Thesiya · 12 min read
On the fourth afternoon of the third Test against New Zealand at Trent Bridge, Ben Stokes was bowling. Word went round the ground that he had told his team-mates that morning, in a dressing room gone quiet, that this would be his last match for England. Then, almost on cue, he took a wicket with the next ball he sent down. It was the kind of thing that had stopped feeling like coincidence where Stokes was concerned. A few hours earlier he had asked the room for one thing: to go out and give everything for two more days.
He was 35. It was not one injury this time, it was the accumulation: four years of captaining the side, leading the attack and batting in the middle order, often in the same session. He called it burnout. "I maybe potentially had burnt myself out," he admitted.
Most of the tributes will be about the batting, and they should be. But the part worth arguing over is the captaincy, and what he and Brendon McCullum did to English cricket from 2022. It was exciting and it was aggressive. It was also flawed, and at times it was naive. All of that is true at once, and the honest version of the story keeps the lot.
How England came to play this way is a story in itself: a dying team that had won one of its previous seventeen Tests, a rude text message, a coach who had never coached red-ball cricket, and a goal bigger than winning the Ashes. We tell that in Part 1. What matters here is the idea they landed on, and the part of it that almost everyone watching got wrong.
What it actually was
The caricature of mindless slogging missed half of it. CricViz found that even on defensive shots, England under Stokes lost their wickets less often, and scored more, than the orthodox Australians they played against. The aggression was real, but so was the instruction nobody quoted back: absorb pressure when it comes, then hand it back.
A bowling strategy in disguise
This is the part the sixes hid. It looked like a batting strategy built for entertainment, but it worked mostly as a bowling one. The point of scoring fast was to buy time: take few enough overs over your own runs and you leave yourself enough of the match to bowl the other side out twice.
Test matches are won by taking twenty wickets, and twenty wickets take time. A side that bats for two days to make 500 has often batted its way to a draw: there are no longer enough hours left to dismiss the opposition twice on a good pitch. McCullum's instructions, stripped to the bone, put the bowlers first. Take wickets — you need twenty. Bat to apply pressure, and absorb it when you must. In the field, chase everything. The batting was in service of the bowling, not the other way around.
It shows the value of how quickly we batted. We created so much time to take 20 wickets.
Jack Leach, after England won at Rawalpindi
Rawalpindi, in December 2022, was the proof. On a pitch so flat that nobody believed a result was possible, England scored at six and a half an over, declared, and bowled Pakistan out with minutes of light to spare. It won a Test that any previous England side would have drawn, because no previous England side scored fast enough to leave the time to bowl them out. The speed was the point, not a flourish.
The underlying numbers back this up, and they are not what you would expect from a team accused of not caring about results. Under Stokes, England took their wickets faster than any England side in history. And almost every match they won, they won quickly, wrapped up well inside the time a Test allows.
The numbers, kept simple
The scoring rate is where it all starts, and the jump is stark. The team that had crawled along at 2.89 an over began racing at close to five — faster, in their 2023 Ashes, than any England side had managed in any Ashes ever, including the fabled summer of 2005.
What that speed unlocked was the lost art of the run chase. For a century and a half, chasing a big fourth-innings target was something Test teams simply did not do; they shut up shop and survived for the draw. England stopped surviving and started chasing — and, astonishingly, kept getting there.
It began at Edgbaston in his first month, when England knocked off 378 against India — their highest successful chase ever — as though it were routine. And it showed up in the one statistic that most annoyed the traditionalists: Stokes declared his first innings more often, and earlier, than any captain before him, and almost never paid for it with a draw. A declaration is a bet that you have time to win, and for a long time the bet kept coming off.
The record is genuinely good, and worth stating plainly. He led England in 44 Tests and won 24, a win rate near 54 per cent, the best of any long-serving England captain (Root and Cook both finished in the low forties). But he lost 17 too, including two 4–1 maulings: India in 2024, and Australia in the 2025–26 Ashes, the series that finished him off. The wins were real. So were the holes.
But is that the whole story?
Before we hand the idea a halo, the honest thing is to argue with it, because plenty of people do. Stokes and McCullum almost never talked about time, or about needing twenty wickets. They talked about freedom — playing without fear, taking the brave option, putting on a show. The tidy "it was really a bowling strategy" reading is mostly something the rest of us built afterwards. The players lived it as a mood, not a spreadsheet, and the quick scoring may just be what happens when you tell good batters to stop worrying about getting out.
There is a plainer purpose the time argument can talk past, too: entertainment as an end in itself. Key's brief was to make Test cricket worth watching again so the format would survive, and filling grounds was the point, not a means to some bowling plan. The attack England had was also often thin — an ageing James Anderson, Wood and Archer forever managing injuries, Stokes's own knee going. You can read the fast batting as papering over a fragile bowling unit rather than setting up a great one.
The strongest objection is the away record. If the engine were really score fast, buy time, take twenty wickets, it should have worked everywhere. It didn't. England were beaten 4–1 in India and 4–1 in Australia, on pitches where quick runs simply did not turn into wickets. That points to bowling quality and conditions deciding matches, not hours on the clock — and to Rawalpindi, the showcase for the whole argument, being a flat-pitch one-off rather than the rule.
So the fair position is that Bazball was several things at once: a state of mind, a rescue act for a dying format, and, on the right pitch, a way of manufacturing time to bowl a side out. The time-and-bowling lens is the one most people miss, which is exactly why it is worth pressing. But it explains the home wins far better than the away defeats, and anyone who tells you it was only ever one thing is selling you something.
The rest of the story
That is what Bazball was, and the argument over what it really was. The rest of the story comes in its own parts: where the method broke down away from home, the man who made players believe in it, and the honest final verdict on whether four strange, thrilling years were worth it.