SYDNEY, Jan 7 : England need to finally move away from their high-risk, attacking ‘Bazball’ style of cricket and get back to basics after their Ashes series defeat, former captain Michael Vaughan told Reuters in an interview on Wednesday.
England ended the fourth day of the fifth and final test, at the Sydney Cricket Ground, battling to avoid falling to a 4-1 loss, despite the positives of centuries from Joe Root and 22-year-old Jacob Bethell.
Vaughan, who led England to a famous home Ashes series win over Australia in 2005, said it was time for team bosses to recognise that the style imposed by coach Brendon McCullum and captain Ben Stokes had ultimately failed.
“The way that England play, that ‘Bazball method’, the ultra-risky method with the bat in hand hasn’t worked because they haven’t won the big series,” said Vaughan, who is working as an analyst for Fox Sports TV.
“They haven’t beaten India. They haven’t beaten Australia. And obviously they’ve lost another Ashes series and they’re not anywhere near a World Test Championship final.
“So it’s (a need for) acceptance from the management and the leadership group and the ECB that things need to change.”
The Yorkshireman said that the first innings 160 from Root and Bethell’s second innings ton, both built on a solid, orthodox approach to batting, offered a clear guide to the way forward for the team.
“That’s the tempo of test match batting, you just play the ball on the merit,” he added.
“They’re all going to score because they are naturally gifted players but the real high-risk way of playing, I’m afraid it hasn’t worked.”
As well as opposing the zealous approach to fast run-scoring under the current England regime, Vaughan questioned the lack of attention to detail along with the widely criticised preparations for this series.
“They need a bit more focus on that attention to detail which is required at the highest level. All the other teams, New Zealand, South Africa, India, Australia, they all seem to have more focus on attention to detail,” he said.
“England look like a camp that’s quite loose and that’s something they have to tighten up.”
CHANGE ESSENTIAL
McCullum has an “all-formats” coaching contract with the ECB running until the end of 2027 – after the next Ashes series in England – and whatever happens to the coach, Vaughan says the status quo approach cannot remain.
“I would hope that there’ll be discussions after the tour to see where everyone sits down, but if the team want to stay together, they have to change,” he said.
“It’s not down to everyone else to change. It’s down to the leadership group to accept. Stubbornness is a wonderful thing in sport, but it can always be a danger if you become too stubborn and think you’re doing it right all the time.
“There probably needs to be some honest conversations from those that are in the group, the hierarchy of the ECB, to try and think, ‘Can they change? Can they move forward with learnings from this trip?'”
If the team leadership cannot countenance that change, their future might be called into doubt, Vaughan thought.
“I don’t want to see anyone lose their positions, but I just want to see an acceptance that if you look at English cricket as a whole over the last two or three years, we’ve actually had a real poor time,” he said.
“The white-ball team’s gone backwards. Our women’s team have gone backwards. Now, obviously, it’s another series where England haven’t won.
“So, at the hierarchy level, they’ve got to start looking at what’s actually happening within the English game.”
The focus, the former England skipper argued, needed to be on identifying and developing talented players with solid techniques and more conventional approaches to batting.
With Root 35 and Stokes 34, a change of generation is on the horizon and while Harry Brook brings extraordinary attacking flair, Vaughan thinks England need a core of solid batsmen.
“They’re going to need more Joe-style players than Harry Brooks,” he said.
“Harry Brook’s a freak, he plays the game in a way that not many can play. My concern for a while in English cricket is that they’ve been looking for more Harrys and not enough Joes. They’ve got to look for a few more Joes. Proper players.”
