‘Bazball really winds them up’: England opener’s Ashes spray

3 hours ago 2

“Bazball” winds up Australia’s cricketers, England won’t be “nice guys” in the Ashes this summer and Pat Cummins’ back injury could “play into” the hands of the tourists.

The English may not have landed in Australia, but they are already making plenty of noise, playing some provocative verbal shots ahead of a defining Ashes series for the Bazball project.

Opener Zak Crawley set the tone for the 2023 bout in England by cracking Cummins to the cover boundary first ball, and he has declared Ben Stokes’ team will be hoping to “wind up” the hosts this time around.

Zak Crawley finds the boundary first ball of the 2023 Ashes series.

“Bazball really winds them up, doesn’t it?” Crawley said in a candid interview in The Times before the England white-ball squad arrived in New Zealand over the weekend. “Which is great. If they get wound up, then that’s better for us.

“All that stuff after the last series, talking about ‘the moral Ashes’ after what happened with Jonny Bairstow [getting stumped by Alex Carey at Lord’s], that was just a consequence of us drawing the series. In my eyes, if they’d won, they would never have said it, so it’s a compliment that they felt the need.”

Though he is no longer in the England side, Bairstow’s punchy attitude is clearly still evident in how Crawley sees the series. As previously stated by Harry Brook in particular, England won’t be shy about sledging Australia.

“Jonny Bairstow always said, ‘You’ve got to stick your chest out against Australia’. And I think he’s right, even if that’s not your personality, you’ve got to show them,” Crawley said. “They’re very competitive, they’re very good at cricket, and they’re in your face and want to get on top of you.

“So it’s important to stand up for yourself and I feel like we showed in the India series we’re not just nice guys who are going to roll over. That’ll be important in Australia, to front up at times. And I like that side of it.”

Brook was recently promoted to vice-captain of England, and his rhetoric upon hearing about the diminishing chances of Cummins starting the Ashes series was typically blunt.

England batsman Zak Crawley and India captain Shubman Gill during a spiteful Lord’s Test this year.

“With him out of their side for the first game, from what we’ve seen, hopefully that plays into our hands,” Brook said at an end of season awards night. “Obviously he is an amazing bowler and has been for many years; he bowls at high pace with high skill. But they have a lot of good bowlers, quick bowlers, so we can’t take anybody lightly.”

Joe Root, who is coming to Australia as a revered senior player rather than as the harried captain of the previous two unsuccessful touring sides, has not been shy in stating that this is England’s best chance in over a decade.

“It definitely does, if I am being brutally honest,” Root said recently when asked if this feels like his best opportunity to win the urn away from home. “The thing that I’m most excited about is going there with a completely different approach as a playing group.

“We’re going to be able to hit them with something quite different in terms of our bowling attack, and the opportunity to potentially play three or four bowlers that bowl 90mph-plus for a sustained period of time.

“It’s not like we are going to go there with the same formula and expect different results. We are going to go there and try and do it in a slightly different way, which is really exciting.”

Whether it is Brook, Root or Crawley, all of England’s players will be earnestly hoping that Stokes, their talismanic captain, can keep his body together for five Tests. To that end, Stokes has pushed his men to take the ball away from him at times.

“I have full faith he is going to be there,” Brook said. “Everybody in the world knows what he’s like, his character and the way he just cracks on. That is the way the team is built now: everybody keeps going. If you do have a little niggle, just power through – and that is what he does so well.

“There are people off the pitch to help with that side of things, but he told us last year as a group that if he gets into a position like that again, then go up and have a word with him. He wants to bowl long spells and that can sometimes be to his detriment.”

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