- By Himanshu Badola
- Sun, 09 Jul 2023 05:41 PM (IST)
- Source:JND
JE Sports Desk: England's new 'Bazball' approach has done enough to gain headlines all around the cricketing fraternity but is struggling to get results despite playing attacking cricket in the ongoing Ashes series at home.
Their horrible performance saw them go 2-0 down with getting so much criticism from experts and former players.
India batting legend Sunil Gavaskar, however, believes that their 'Bazball' approach will not work for the hosts in Ashes having already been under so much scrutiny for their batting woes.
Gavaskar stated In his column for the newspaper ‘Mid-day’ that England should “forget” Bazball and reserve it only for weaker teams.
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“As for Bazball, forget it. It happened against lesser quality bowling, but against a top-class Australian attack it’s back to good old grinding batting and not T20 shots,” Gavaskar wrote.
“Test cricket is, after all, Test cricket.”
Earlier, England's legendary former batter Geoffrey Boycott had also criticised the side's aggressive approach with the bat.
“They (England team) lost sight of the fact that the object is to win and then if you want to entertain then yes, by all means. But why can’t you win and entertain? When you get ahead of yourself – and that’s what England did – they stopped thinking,” Boycott had said before the Lord's Test, where the hosts had conceded a 43-run loss.
"If you’re going to just entertain, they might as well be a circus. That’s it, go be a professional circus around the world," he had said.
On the other hand, captain Ben Stokes and coach Brendon McCullum have decided to stick to their plans and said that they can bounce back in the series, giving an example of series wins over New Zealand, South Africa, and Pakistan over the past year.
The hosts are in a commanding position as they bowled Australia out for just 224 runs in the second innings and started well with the bat, scoring 27/0 at the end of the third day in Headingley.