Bazball's mission to Moscow

It created a revolution when Brendon McCullum and England’s Test side adopted it. But we’ve seen this before.

I've been thinking about Bazball a lot recently because Bazball’s back. Alright. We had Test Bazball, and now we have limited-overs Bazball. Which, I suppose, is Test Bazball on a slightly different frequency.

But Bazball is much weirder when you think about it. I don’t know which version of Bazball we’re on, maybe it’s version three. Or maybe it’s version four. But I’ll try and work out how many Bazballs we’ve had, what it actually is, where it came from, and how we ended up all the way back to the start again.

The phrase Bazball came from Andrew Miller at Cricinfo, but by the time he coined it, it was already a Brendon McCullum style of cricket. So you have to actually go back to McCullum for a moment. The Baz in Bazball.

It’s very interesting to think that, at one stage, he was fighting for a spot in the New Zealand team with Luke Ronchi. He wasn’t always making runs. Everyone knew how talented he was, but the results weren’t always there.

When he had finally solidified his position in the team, there was an opportunity to make him captain. He even asked to be captain, but didn’t get it. Then, he kind of just took the captaincy from Ross Taylor in a bloodless coup. Although some people might say it wasn't particularly bloodless.

And then New Zealand went to South Africa, and they had just the worst time. It was really, really bad. So all the players got together and asked themselves hard questions. “What are we doing? Are we going to become freelance players in franchise cricket? Are we going to take New Zealand cricket seriously?”

Arising from that, they went all-in on a method that I suppose we would now call Bazball. But it did take a little while to come together. There were lots of different aspects that needed to fall in place. McCullum had to eventually give up the gloves, and most important to the renaissance was Neil Wagner. At that stage, no one really thought that Wagner was about to become one of the more important cricketers in the world.

He kind of became that when he was playing against India in a match, and was struggling to get wickets conventionally. And so, he went with short-pitched bowling. Of course, lots of people have tried short-pitched bowling before. What Wagner did though, was bowl incredibly long spells of short-pitched bowling, and he was very accurate with it. Meanwhile, McCullum set fields that were only set for short-pitched bowling. As a batter, that’s all that was going to happen. You were going to face 60 balls, at 135 kmph, aimed probably at your left shoulder. Over and over again. And you had to make batting decisions.

From that, we got the first version of what we would see as Bazball. So this is really a Bazball origins story.

And remember that New Zealand were doing terribly, as we said, in South Africa and India, and they started to win a lot. We know how much they eventually won, especially in Test cricket, because they ended up as the world's No.1 team and they won the World Test Championship.

Now, a lot of that is not under McCullum, but the very basics that McCullum started with is what they went on with. For instance, Wagner and the funky fields. The other thing that McCullum really brought to that New Zealand side was finding a role for each player based on their strengths. So BJ Watling goes from being a struggling opening batter, who's not even wicketkeeping, to a specialist wicketkeeper at No.6 who bats like a blocker. There were some games where they would come out and slog really, really hard… and other games where they would defend a lot. They were a very fluid side, but a lot of it was about their strengths, the bouncers, and the fields that they were setting.

In limited-overs cricket, they had a lot more freedom. And if you remember McCullum at that time, he was absolutely wild. His ability to just charge down the wicket and flap balls around his body over deep backward point or deep midwicket, against the best bowlers in the world, completely destroyed teams. They didn't know what to do to him.

That was very much Bazball batting. They got regular wickets too, which goes back to Wagner as well. They also understood that you had to continue to get wickets all the way through. They weren't looking at just letting the game flow. New Zealand were a wicket-taking side.

McCullum has also been around KKR in the IPL. In fact, he set up the whole IPL with that innings of 158 on the first day. Quite a handy innings to play on the first day of the IPL. He’s only been a player there for most seasons, with one less-than-memorable captaincy stint in 2009. But he’s obviously been involved with the leadership group. And I think playing in the IPL, getting paid lots of money specifically for what he's really good at, which is thrashing the ball around everywhere, played a big part too. So his leadership of New Zealand and the IPL experience actually started to develop together.

This is where the third part of it all comes in. Because along comes Eoin Morgan, an Irish cricketer playing in England, who also ended up at KKR. He built a relationship with McCullum and imbibed his ideas. That led to one of the best periods in white-ball cricket ever for England, between 2015 and 2019. They only won one ICC event, which is ridiculous considering how they played in that period. Of course, Carlos Brathwaite took one away from them, and they had a shocking game against Pakistan in the Champions Trophy 2017 semifinal. But if you look at their overall records and what they actually did, they changed white-ball cricket forever in that period.

And Morgan was quite open in saying that a lot of this just came from Brendon McCullum. Where it gets even more interesting is, before McCullum came to England as a coach, he was actually the KKR coach. And who was the KKR captain for some of that period? Eoin Morgan. So there is a link between Morgan and McCullum. Even though they're very close, they're very different kinds of people. Morgan is a calculated type, very organised, very planned. He's getting messages from the analyst off field with chess moves.

And McCullum, of course, is total vibes, but genius vibes. He is seeing things that other people are not seeing.

At KKR, they get back together and they have a great run in one period, even though Morgan is clearly washed and is never going to make runs again.

At this stage – unless you are from KKR, or you've listened to Morgan a lot, or you’ve got McCullum peeled back in the 2015 World Cup – McCullum was an important player, but not the most important. His team didn’t win the World Cup final, and they didn’t go to No.1 in the world. KKR were a really good team when he played for them, but they weren’t a powerhouse. England’s success was linked to McCullum at times, but he wasn't actually the one in charge. Then too, when he came back for KKR, there were lots of KKR fans who weren't particularly happy with the way that the team was playing.

But the one place that seemed to think about him completely differently was always England.

Some of that is just linked to the Morgan relationship. So when McCullum was brought in to be the coach, it was of course to be the coach of the white-ball team. And he said, ‘Nah, I want to try the red-ball team.’

This is where it gets really, really fascinating.

When he coached the Test team, all he really did was go back and use their plan from 2015-2019. What he essentially did was copying an England plan from 2015-19, based on the England talent pool that was available at that time, that was copied from his original plan. It is a bit of a copy of a copy at that point.

Bazball has been discussed more than any cricket concept. Almost ever. We don't have to go through it. Essentially it boils down to two key parts. Disrupt when you bat. And then if you've disrupted well enough, you should be able to pick up singles, like the middle overs back in the 2015-19 years. And when you bowl, try and manufacture wickets. Maybe that is your spinner bowling without a deep backward square leg to encourage someone who doesn't normally sweep to sweep more. Usually, it just means bowling bouncers. In fact, most of Bazball is just bowling bouncers.

And if you go back to 2015-19, they had Liam Plunkett, Jofra Archer and Mark Wood all bowling lots of bouncers. Remember, Wagner started with the bouncers. So bouncers are very important, and the disruptive batting is very important.

Those are kind of the two key frameworks of what Bazball is. It had some success and some failure, and you can go anywhere you want to have a look at that. We've probably done about 19 videos and pieces looking at it and breaking it down, because it is one of the more fascinating things that has happened in modern cricket.

But then what happens after this, of course, is that the white-ball team – which had been really, really good – suddenly starts to suck. And so, they ask McCullum to come over and take over the white-ball sides too. It’s a circle of life, this evolution of Brendon McCullum and his own tactics. Even when other people were using them and changing them, he incorporated their changes back into Bazball.

We still don't know exactly what England are going to do in white-ball cricket. We've seen a bunch of T20 games and a couple of ODIs. Do you know what we've seen though? Reckless, disruptive type of batting and tons of bouncers. It is the same thing over and over again. To the point that, if you have a look at some of the fields that England had in the T20I series against India, you had multiple slips at random points of the game. You had leg slips, leg gullies, short covers, short midwickets. A catching mid-on at one point. Deep midwicket fielders who are 30 metres inside the boundary, in the exact same position that they used to have for Wagner in Test matches.

It’s Bazball, but it's Bazball-ception. We just keep going around and doing the same things over and over again. This new white-ball Bazball isn't that much different from the Test Bazball. It's the same theories, over and over again.

With someone like McCullum, a lot of it is about vibes,confidence and letting people fly their freak flags. We get all that, but when it comes down to it tactically, it's actually not that different to how we started. Brendon McCullum is going to try and disrupt with the bat and cause all sorts of issues for the opposition. And Neil Wagner is going to manufacture wickets in the middle to make sure that they're constantly striking.

We started at that same spot, and we went all the way around in McCullum’s career, and we're still doing the same thing. The difference is that when it happened with New Zealand, not that many people were paying attention. It was New Zealand cricket, and they hadn’t won anything massive at that stage. Also, Australia were talking down New Zealand's success every chance they got at that point. (Not that that's a particularly rare thing for Australians to do).

With KKR, when he was coach, it brought some results, but KKR weren’t thought of as pioneering, and their results weren’t on the level of a CSK or MI.

Then you've got England. I remember writing so many things about England and literally getting Australian, South African and other cricketers from around the world going, “Why do you keep going on about this team? It's England, they're going to stuff it up.”

Everyone thought this would work, despite the reverses in the 2016 T20 World Cup and the 2017 Champions Trophy. And then they got to 2019, and considering how dominant they had been in white-ball cricket, they only just got over the line. Let us say, by the barest of margins. In that period, England didn't dominate unless they were in a bilateral, and then they just pounded everyone in the face.

From 2019 to 2022, they won two tournaments, which is still really good for a team that didn't have a history of winning tournaments. But it never quite lived up to what they were like bilaterally.

And at KKR in 2021, the team went on an incredible run in the back end of the season. But again, that went completely under the radar. Bazball being coined and England adopting the tactic was the first time anyone actually paid attention. And by that I mean the entire cricket world. People love Bazball, they hate Bazball. You can get t-shirts mocking Bazball, and I’m pretty sure you can put it down as your religion in a census.

It's a word in the dictionary now. It’s not just a word that Andrew Miller threw out because he had a column due.

And because it became the most talked about, the most thought about, obsessed over, ridiculed, promoted, discussed, argued concept in modern cricket – everyone knows exactly what Bazball is, probably more so than any other time in McCullum’s journey. We all know what it is, even if some of us still misunderstand it at times and others get a little too excited by it.

We also know what Bazball is going to be. Look at what the Australians did when they played that Test series against England. They put their fielders out on the boundary early on and went, okay, now you're going to have to play a slightly different kind of cricket.

You can scheme for Bazball. You can plan for Bazball. We understand its strengths and its limits at this point. We also understand that because England believe so much in it, sometimes you can allow them to Bazball themselves out of a game. And that brings us back to England adopting Bazball in limited-overs cricket.

To recap: the first version of Bazball was in the 2015 World Cup. The spread-out KKR years is the sequel. England's version, even though McCullum is not involved, is clearly the third incarnation at that point. Then you have the actual Bazball itself, or when the world started calling it that, but it’s the fourth time that concept is seen. So now, we watch England with their bouncers, their slogging, and their weird field settings – and we know that we are in the fifth version of Bazball.

But everyone knows what that is. It is a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy. England are essentially mailing their plans in.

The 2015-19 period is probably when England used Bazball the best, even if McCullum wasn’t in charge of any English team. Part of the reason they were so good in this period is that they had two quality spinners, and they had a bunch of people who could play spin.

By the time they got to white-ball sides also officially adopting Bazball, their ability to bowl spin and play spin had almost completely disappeared. They've tried to disrupt as much as possible, and they stole a Test in India doing it. But, we've also seen the limitations of that, and Pakistan embarrassed them recently. Now, they're back trying to play spin again, and we can see that they don't have it.

The genius of Bazball and Brendon McCullum has always been to highlight your strengths and ignore your weaknesses. How do you do that when just playing spin or bowling spin is one of them? That's a hard thing to overcome and to work through. That’s a hard thing to, well, Bazball.

Right now, there isn't any young Indian player who hasn't even casually seen and understood what Bazball is trying to do. Sanju Samson was getting ready for the pull shot sometimes before the bowler had the ball in his hand. Everyone knows what they are going to do.

When Phil Salt comes out, everyone is aware of the kinds of shots that he is going to play. The reverses that Ben Duckett is going to do, the running down the wicket, all those different things that England do are now a lot more normal.

When Bazball was adopted by the England Test side, especially when it was taken from limited-overs cricket, it was like being punched in the face by a right-hand lead by a boxer. Even if someone tells you they’re going to do it beforehand, it’s such a weird thing to happen that it catches you off guard.

And if they hit you in the face, they've hit you in the face. And that's what a lot of Bazball's early success was built on. But now, there's no surprise anymore, it’s completely gone. I assumed that England would bowl more 90-mile-an-hour bowlers, they would bowl more bouncers, and they would up the explosiveness. Even though they were pretty explosive in 2015-19, and even in the period when they were failing after that. They were pretty explosive all the way through, and we knew exactly how England were going to play cricket.

That's one of the most fascinating things about all this. Its main success came from surprise, even if there were lots of tactical nuggets within it. But if you can't play spin, and everyone else knows exactly how you're going to play, you do what India did. In those T20I games, even when India got behind, they waited for England to take chances that they didn't need to take. Because everyone knows how England are going to play. They tell us every chance they get.

Bazball, the term? That's new.

Bazball, the cricket? Oh we've done it. We've got a prequel in McCullum and Wagner. The cult film that no one watched, when McCullum was doing it with New Zealand subsequently. The sequel that's often been forgotten with the KKR years. The spin off, which was Morgan and England doing it in 2015-19.

The surprise smash hit of the franchise, which was when McCullum and Ben Stokes adopted it for Test cricket. And, white-ball Bazball, or as I've started calling it ‘Mission to Moscow’. Because it’s everything we've ever seen before. It just has fewer stars.