Another Win For Stokes and McCullum | Is it The BazBall effect?
What England did on the first day of the recently ended Test match against Pakistan shattered several records as well as forced people to start talking about their much famed Bazball approach again.
After that epochal day, the Bazball approach once again became the talk of the town. Introduced by the English coach Brendon McCullum along with the Skipper Ben Stokes, this approach has only one principle: to play fearlessly and bravely. No other instance can be a better representative of this approach than the 657 runs by the English in the first innings of the match which broke a One Hundred and Twelve years old record.
Even before the first Test match started, Baz cleared to everyone that their only aim is to make sure the game does not end as a draw, “I can almost guarantee when the skipper comes in here in 48 hours time he’ll say there’ll be no draws in the series.We’ll certainly be pushing for results because we see it as our obligation to try and ensure that people walk away entertained. And if we get beat, Pakistan, we know, will have played well. I expect us to play well and if we get outplayed, that’s okay too.”
Many people misunderstood this approach as only ‘an aggressive and attacking form of cricket’, however, English men proved them wrong too after they took a brilliant yet extremely bold step of declaring their second innings on 264-7 and giving Pakistan a target of 343 runs. The step, as the statement goes, was not for the faint hearted but in the case of Stokes-led men the approach had full backing and confidence of the visiting side. From the body language that the English captain and team exhibited on the field, it looked like they had everything planned out for this game.
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How the results came in the favor of the three lions, one can say with conviction, the Bazball approach is not a reckless approach to cricket. If anything, from what the English team made us witness in their previous few Test series, the strategy encourages the team to make sure to take brave steps even when they demand treading the path opposite of what is normally deemed ‘a safer side’. Surely it is not a coincidence that the English team has not seen any of their matches ending as a draw since the arrival of the Bazball mantra and have only lost 1 of their 7 matches since.
The McCullum-coached English team are now preparing to enter the Multan Stadium all guns blazing too and to carry out rocking the world by their newly found key to success, the unorthodox technique, Bazball.
