Former England captain Nasser Hussain has questioned whether England’s much-vaunted Bazball revolution has delivered anything meaningfully different after another heavy Ashes defeat in Australia, arguing that familiar frailties have resurfaced despite a radical rethink.
England’s latest setback was sealed by an 82-run loss in the third Test at Adelaide on Sunday, handing Australia an unassailable 3-0 lead and wrapping up the Ashes after just three of the five matches. It marked England’s first away Ashes series of the Bazball era, following the 2022 appointments of Brendon McCullum as head coach and Ben Stokes as captain.
While Hussain acknowledged the intent behind England’s transformation, he was blunt in his assessment of the outcome. Speaking on the Ashes Daily episode of the Sky Sports Cricket Podcast, Hussain said the performances on this tour have looked all too familiar.
“I quite like the fact they have done things different over the last four years since the last Ashes drubbing,” Hussain said. “They’ve thought ahead. If you carry on doing what you have always done, you will get the same results, so they saw we need to do something different.
“But actually, if you’ve come here and looked at them in the last three-four weeks you’d have thought, ‘is it really that different from any other England side?’ They’ve not batted well, they’ve not bowled well, they’ve not caught well. Under key moments and pressure situations they’ve buckled.”
Hussain pointed out that, bar the 2010-11 triumph under Andrew Strauss, England’s tours to Australia have followed a similar pattern, regardless of personnel or philosophy. He underlined that Joe Root has now played 17 Tests in Australia without a single win, highlighting the depth of the problem England were trying to address with their Bazball rethink.
“That’s why there was this rethink,” Hussain added. “But actually, even after the massive rethink and left-field selections and ‘we must have pace’ and ‘we must have batters that put bowlers under pressure’, we’ve ended up getting exactly what we’ve had on virtually every other Ashes tour. That’s what disappoints me, because I thought this time, with this opposition, it might have been slightly different. It has been no different.”
Former England captain Michael Atherton echoed that sense of frustration, suggesting the context of the series made England’s failure even harder to accept. Australia have been disrupted by injuries both before and during the contest, yet England have been unable to capitalise.
“We’ve been on a lot of Ashes tours – I think this is my 10th – and seen a few bad ones, a few whitewashes,” Atherton said. “Actually, this has been as disappointing as any for me because I felt England had the tools to do the job here, or at least challenge, and that there were weaknesses or areas to exploit in the Australian team.”
Instead, England’s bold branding has again collided with the harsh realities of touring Australia, leaving Bazball facing uncomfortable questions about whether philosophy alone can overcome deeply entrenched problems Down Under.
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