Bazball doubters beware - England's truth is the only truth that matters

How could you ever have doubted that England would emerge triumphant in the first Test at Hyderabad? Well, let's count the ways …

Maybe your scepticism kicked in way back in December, at the moment of England's squad announcement, when the only stats that could justify Tom Hartley's call-up centred around his "release point", rather than his 40 wickets in 20 first-class games. Writing in the Daily Mail, Paul Newman declared Hartley's presence was "a reflection of the dearth of spin options available in domestic cricket".

Maybe that scepticism kicked in early last week when, in the Bazball-approved manner, Ben Stokes announced his three-spin-one-seamer team more than 24 hours before the toss, as if determined to be a martyr to hubris. "Bazbollocks!" declared the veteran broadcaster Jim Maxwell on X/Twitter. "Absurd selection. Unbalanced. Inexperienced. At least England picked a wicketkeeper".

Perhaps your hopes rallied during England's feisty opening stand on the first morning of the Test, only to be dashed in the 15th over of the innings by Ollie Pope's ghastly 1 from 11 balls, a tormented stay that ended with a stiff-handed jab to slip. (I'll throw my own prediction under the bus here: "I probably wouldn't pick Pope yet," had been my hot take on ESPNcricinfo's pre-series Switch Hit podcast. "I'm not sure I trust him in these conditions…")

Or perhaps, come the first afternoon, you took one look at Hartley's left-arm offerings - much as Yashasvi Jaiswal did at the top of India's innings - and winced as his maiden delivery was carted over long-on for the first of two sixes in the over. "Simon Kerrigan!" declared social media in unison, as another ill-starred Lancastrian left-arm spinner started trending mysteriously online.

Don't worry, you'd hardly be alone if you suspended your belief in England's staying power. Steve Harmison's tipping point, for instance, had long since come and gone, during the squad's golfing holiday-cum-training camp in Abu Dhabi in the days before the first Test.

"It's player power, that's all it is, and it stinks," Harmison thundered on talkSPORT, adding that an England team would "never go into an Ashes series in Australia just three days before it starts". Oh really? Hold my piña colada, Harmy…

Because here we are, 48 hours after the event, assessing the void in the narrative where our collective preconceptions once resided. England's 14th victory in 19 Tests of the Bazball era was without question the most astonishing of the lot, and anyone who claims it was never in doubt is delusional.

Which, of course, brings us to the crux of the matter.

For there's a post-truth element to England's preposterous self-belief. At the close of the second day's play, for instance, with England facing a deficit of 175 and climbing, and with bits of Hartley's bowling figures still being retrieved from the stadium rafters, Jeetan Patel the spin coach was trotted out to do a round of media interviews that redefined the limits of positive reinforcement.

Neil Manthorp, Harmison's sidekick on talkSPORT, could scarcely believe his ears as Patel started plotting England's route to victory in bare-faced defiance of all the available evidence. "Nothing's impossible with this group," Patel said. "I know they are excited about getting their opportunity with the bat [in the third innings] and where they can get the game to from there".

"If I was an England spinner who'd just gone for 100, I'd want Jeetan Patel as my coach," Manthorp told his listeners moments later. "I'd want to fall into his arms in the changing room and be reassured by him."

It wasn't just the radio waves that poured scorn on England's tactics for this Test. "Bazball is unravelling in India and it's England's own fault", thundered a headline in the i, while down in Australia, Fox Sports set about mocking the old enemy's apparent obsession with "moral victories", while quoting the Telegraph's accusation that Stokes' men had been "glugging the Koolaid".

Two days later, of course, all the noise stopped as incredulity swept the board, but the wonder remained that, at no stage, had any of it been remotely heeded in the first place.

For Bazball defies analysis, in the most literal, pig-headed sense. It mocks analysis. It thanks the media for showing interest in its exploits (and for propagating the entertainment factor that remains a core principle of the approach) but any opinions as to how to define it, let alone refine it, are to be left in a pile outside the dressing-room door, thanks very much.

It makes for an epicly effective echo chamber, a closed loop of confirmation bias. Those outside the confines of the dressing-room may quibble all they like about the decisions, the missteps, the areas for manifest improvement. But, just as England stuck with Zak Crawley through thin and thinner in 2022, then reaped the rewards of that faith come the Ashes, the group itself will not hear a word of doubt within those walls … thereby ensuring that there can be no doubt when it all comes together.

Aggression allied to positive reinforcement is hardly unique among successful sports teams (just look at Jurgen Klopp's impact at Liverpool) but tactically speaking, Bazball is more Jedi mind-trick than heavy metal cricket. There's obvious technical savvy underpinning England's approach - one aspect of Hartley's second-innings bounceback, for instance, was Patel's suggestion that he slow down his run-up to focus more on his action - but it seems that nothing was more important to his revived state of mind than the team getting around him and hyping up the six that he had struck off R Ashwin, the first of England's tour.

This willful ignorance of the established facts of Test cricket can and will get England into a number of prickly situations, perhaps none more so than the infamous declaration at Edgbaston that changed the destiny of the Ashes last summer. But you'll never hear Stokes issue a word of regret at such moments, let alone McCullum, who doubled down at the end of that same Test by declaring that England's two-wicket loss felt "like a win".

And the more they reassert such ostensibly untenable positions, the harder it is to penetrate this exo-skeleton of supreme self-belief.

That is where Bazball really is unique, and arguably inimitable. Individual feats of genius have been a hallmark of Test upsets all throughout history, but almost without exception, the greatest have been solipsistic masterpieces, compiled in defiance of a team that would have crumbled without their iron-willed input. Think of Brian Lara in Barbados in 1999, Graham Gooch at Headingley 1991, or Kevin Pietersen in the Ashes-sealing draw at The Oval 2005.

Pope's 196 in Hyderabad is self-evidently a worthy addition to the canon: the next highest score was Ben Duckett's 47, and Stokes has already described it as the greatest innings by an Englishman in Asia. Yet it was dredged not from the depths of adversity like all of those last-ditch forebears, but from a pedestal of opportunity provided by that unquestioningly supportive dressing-room. We could have been watching Crawley at Old Trafford, Harry Brook in Rawalpindi, Bairstow at Trent Bridge or Edgbaston 2022, or any one of the 24 centuries that England have compiled in 19 matches of the Bazball era. Regardless of the match situation, the permission to strut was identical.

On an individual basis, the last England player to front up with such a bulletproof persona was arguably Pietersen circa 2006 - after his starring role in the Ashes, and before the advent of DRS and his much-storied troubles against left-arm spinners. Criticism bounced off him in that period, much as cricket balls pinged off his brazenly attacking blade, and as for his justification for the moments when he succumbed to a fractional error of judgement, well, "that's just the way I play" … a mantra that Eoin Morgan would borrow a decade later as the cornerstone of England's revival, across white-ball and now red.

But Pietersen was one player in a middlingly successful Test team, not a four-square ethos offering not a hint of mental weakness. By the latter years of his career, the realities of elite sport had corroded his armour and left his vulnerabilities all too visible - and perhaps, after sufficient probing from opponents and pundits alike, the same will one day be said of Bazball as a collective ethos. But, if after results like Hyderabad, you are beginning to doubt that day will come, you're surely not alone.