Last summer, former captain Michael Vaughan described England’s win over India at Headingley as ‘Bazball with brains’. The comment came after Ben Stokes and Brendon McCullum’s team chased down 371 with 5 wickets in hand and in just 82 overs. Vaughan believed England’s batting approach had finally become refined.
Has England finally achieved ‘Bazball with brains’?
Instead of the raw attacking game of 2022, when the term ‘Bazball’ came into existence, this was a refined version of their brand of cricket. However, the comment didn’t age well. England won just 1 match in the remaining 4 Tests against India and lost to Australia 1-4 in the 2025-25 Ashes.
Everyone called for McCullum’s head. This brainless brand of cricket had to go. Well, the England head coach retained his place, and he made basically just 2 changes to the squad: Zak Crawley and Ollie Pope were out for Emilio Gay and James Rew. But it seems like the batting approach has changed, and England are finally playing ‘Bazball with brains’.
In the England vs New Zealand 1st Test, we saw the English batters adapt to the pitch with constant seam movement and variable bounce. Gay didn’t drive every ball outside off like Crawley. Duckett was leaving balls. Jamie Smith has worked on his technique and isn’t just slogging when bowled short.
McCullum praises batters for adjusting
After beating the Kiwis by 115 runs at Lord’s, McCullum expressed satisfaction with how the batters played. On what was a bowling paradise, England managed to score 140 and 226. Meanwhile, New Zealand combined for 251 runs in 2 innings. The England head coach also talked about adjusting, something he has said before as well, but the team never batted like that.
“We need to be quite malleable, depending on the surfaces we get. Nothing needs to be so binary to play one certain way. We need to be able to be adaptable and to adjust when required. I thought conversations that our boys had throughout the Test match, from a coach’s point of view, were fantastic. There was a real communication unfolding, and I think that allowed us to be slightly more adaptable when we needed. Clearly, the issue on that pitch was going to be the full and straight balls here. Defensively, we talked about straightening up your defensive clock to be able to make sure we’re respecting the ball straight. But anything that had width, we were trying to throw our hands at it, knowing that it was going to be a low-scoring game, so you still need to keep ticking over the scoreboard,” McCullum said to Sky Sports.
“I thought the guys were really brave in parts. I don’t mean running down the wicket, swinging bravely. There’ll be times where that is required. I mean brave as in this is a tricky surface. How are we able to manipulate our guard or change where we stand on the crease? Do we come out of a crease or back in the crease? Do you stand on the leg stump, off stump? Just to try and give the bowler something different to look at, because clearly it was weighted in the bowler’s favour. There was some bravery with that. To me, the communication was the best that we’ve seen for a while, and I was really proud of that,” he added.
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