Control measurements can shed light on the efficacy of Bazball in this series in India. We’ll look at the fates of the two teams via three plots to check this. The Indian batters averages 1.5x (39:26) the England batters in this series, which translates to a predicted W/L ratio of about 5:1. Although England have put India in dire positions in this series, much more than the average touring team, India have been the much better side overall. Hampered by the loss of Kohli, Shami, Pant for the whole series and KL Rahul, Ravindra Jadeja and Bumrah for some games, playing debutants, playing on relatively placid surfaces, India have come back from weak positions multiple times to clinch the series. One could argue than even the one England win came on the back on extremely lucky outlier innings from Ollie Pope. Given the state of the Indian side and the pitches used, England should be highly disappointed.
The first plot in our journey shows the False Shot Proportion on the x-axis vs the Wicket lost per false shot on the y-axis. Each point represents one batting innings, which is labelled. The colors signify Ind and Eng.
The farther an inns is along the x-axis, the more the chances taken by that batting team, or the better they bowling they faced. We can easily see that most of England’s inns in this series have had noticeably higher false shot proportion than India’s. This results from the combination of:
Indian bowlers have bowled better and created more chances
English batters have taken more risks, leading to more false shots
The y-axis shows how many of those false shots have yielded wickets. Both India inns in Vizag and one in Ranchi was extremely unlucky for them: the wicket-to-false shot ratio was higher than 0.1 - more than 10% of false shots lost them wickets.
On the contrary, England were extremely lucky in Rajkot (their 1st inns) and Hyderabad. Particularly in the latter, owing to Pope’s knock, their innings had extremely frequent false shots. Very few of these resulted in outs.
The second plot tells us how much run-scoring output was generated in each batting inns: the y-axis shows run rate (runs / ball) and the x-axis shows the false shot proportion. This plot explains the previous one a bit. There are two clear clusters separated by team. England have played a lot more false shots, but they have also got a lot more runs per ball in most cases. In Ranchi and in the 4th innings at Rajkot, they had a low scoring rate, out of which the 1st inns in Ranchi was where they played “normal” cricket - low risk, low run rate.
Except for the 3rd innings blitz in Rajkot, India scored at rates more in keeping with traditional Test cricket.
The proof of the pudding is ultimately, though, in the runs / wicket, or the batting average. The probability of winning in Test cricket depends on the difference between the averages of the two competing sides.
The plot below shows the batting average (y-axis) vs the false shot proportion (x-axis) for both teams. England averaged under 35 in all innings except Hyderabad Inns 3, which contained the Pope knock. In 4/7 innings, India averaged nearly the same or higher than the the cluster of England points on the plot. This despite India falling to unforced errors in the first two games.
The fundamental theorem of cricket is that risk and reward are tied together. If you attempt more shots, you will get more reward in terms of higher scoring rates, but also run the risk of losing wickets. For every format, there is an agreed-upon balance between risk and reward that sets the equilibrium of scoring rate vs wicket rate in the format.
Each format and each situation has an "ideal" attack function: basically the decision-making apparatus of attack vs rotate vs defend depending on the ball. As the format goes shorter, this moves towards rotate/attack from defend. In Test cricket, the "conventional" rules are set, and have been set. You attack only rank "bad" balls.
In Bazball, England are changing that, upending the convention. You take the initiative to attack/rotate on "good" balls if the ball is doing nothing. They succeed because they have the shotmakers and because teams have not formulated a consistent response to this attacking batting yet.
There is a payoff between risk and reward. They have discovered that the risk is overestimated by the conventions of Test cricket, and you can hit more while maintaining the balls per wicket, raising averages. There are also second-order effects of this, like pushing the field back and gathering risk-free singles (which is an important paradigm in ODI batting).
In summary, the “judiciousness” or “selectiveness” of attacking becomes looser as the format goes shorter, because the value of one wicket goes lower. Bazball has disrupted the age-old conventional, comfortable level of “judiciousness” in Test cricket: they attack even the “good” balls - those at good lines and lengths - and they have managed to double the averages in these zones vs pace, without reducing their balls-per-wicket. This has succeeded in part due to brilliant shots by the England players, in part due to the Dukes balls not being as naughty as they once were, and in part due to the pitches not doing as much as they were in England for a majority of Ben Stokes’s captaincy period.
In this series, the last plot and the resulting averages (39:26) have demonstrated that Bazball, or whatever this new approach is, has not worked. Yes, England have run India close at many points in this series, but a chunk of that can also be attributed to India’s inexperience and trials with injuries to major players, in addition to indifferent form on-and-off for their bowlers. As astounding as it has been to witness England’s disruption of Test cricket’s conventional risk-reward curve to some attractive success, the final frontier remains.
I want to ask, does the batting part of Bazball have a chance of becoming a natural part of how Test cricket is played, with newer players having a bigger foundation of shot making compared to predecessors? Or will the conventional risk-reward curve still hold going into the future?