Heads are bound to roll with the latest trouncing suffered by the English cricket team in the Ashes series in Australia, going down tamely to their traditional rivals in the first three Tests. This defeat is particularly galling, as the entire English cricket fraternity, particularly their media and team management, hyped this series as the best chance for the English team, with the Aussies suffering from injuries to some of their key players. All the talk from England of this being the weakest Australian side in 15 years has proven to be nothing but false bravado air, as their much-vaunted side lost the three Tests in the span of just 11 days, with the first at Perth ending in a crushing defeat by eight wickets in a mere two days.
At the heart of this debacle lay the pig-headed attitude towards the hell-for-leather style of cricket which the coach, former New Zealand captain Brendon ‘Baz’ McCullum, and the captain, New Zealand-born Ben Stokes, claim to have invented and which their sycophantic press grandly dubbed ‘Bazball’. While it did result in some spectacular fourth-innings chases, this was mainly on flat English tracks, failing to come off both in spin-friendly India and fast bowling-friendly Australia. The refusal to adapt to the game situation in Australia saw their top batsmen throw their wickets away in absurd fashion, leading to what will surely be the quiet burial of ‘Bazball’, which the rest of the cricket world were led to believe was the saviour of the oldest format.
While McCullum and Managing Director Rob Key look set to lose their jobs—there does not seem to be a suitable replacement for captain Stokes—it is the entire English cricket administration at which fingers are already being pointed. Their obsession with white-ball cricket, particularly their pet format of ‘The 100’, which no other country plays and which was launched with much fanfare in 2021, has seen the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) sideline all other tournaments, including the multi-day County Championship, the oldest and most venerated first-class domestic championship in cricket history. The cricketers’ trade union, the Professional Cricketers’ Association (PCA), must also shoulder its share of the blame, as it constantly seeks to emasculate the County Championship in order to allow its members more breathing space to ply their trade in the various cash-rich T20 franchise leagues around the world, including the IPL. Unless the ECB and the players themselves shift the emphasis back to red-ball domestic cricket, they can kiss goodbye to any hope of winning the Ashes back in the near or distant future.
