S8 Ep369: Headline: The Failure of "Bazball" and Post-Ashes Fallout Guest: Jeremy Zakis Following a devastating Ashes loss to Australia, the English cricket team is reevaluating their aggressive "Bazball" strategy, admitting it acts as psychological warfare that on
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2026
⏱️ 8 minutes
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Summary
Following a devastating Ashes loss to Australia, the English cricket team is reevaluating their aggressive "Bazball" strategy, admitting it acts as psychological warfare that only works against weaker teams. Amidst the fallout, selector Luke Wright has resigned. Meanwhile, an intense heatwave has cancelled local cricket matches and Australia Day festivities.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is the Friends of History Debating Society. I'm John Batchel in New England, very cold. |
| 0:08.7 | Jeremy Zackis, my colleague and correspondent, is in New South Wales, very hot, and it's time to reflect upon the recent ashes loss by the All-England team. |
| 0:20.3 | In the wintertime, we call it the hot stove leave where you sit |
| 0:24.8 | around when it's too cold to play baseball in the north and speculate about you're going to get |
| 0:29.9 | them in the fall and these are the trades we're going to make and the kid who started with a great |
| 0:34.3 | fastball has developed a great curve you talk to each like that, waiting for baseball season to start again. |
| 0:40.6 | Well, they can't do that all the time because this is in the Southern Hemisphere, summertime. |
| 0:46.8 | So they're off to new matches. |
| 0:48.5 | But the English team is reflecting. |
| 0:50.9 | Jeremy, what have they discovered about their poor performance recently in Australia? |
| 0:59.0 | Well, John, the interesting discovery, I guess you could say, by the English cricket board and the cricket team, is that Bassball definitely did not work during the ashes. |
| 1:07.9 | I mean, that's something that no one can dispute, especially the English right now. But the interesting thing is there is a new spin on Basball and how it can actually be applied. And this is really in the wake of the last loss against us there in the ashes and how it was so devastatingly obvious that Basball and the strategy of being very offensive and playing a very fast tile of cricket could actually |
| 1:27.6 | win a five-day test. |
| 1:29.0 | It just doesn't work. |
| 1:30.0 | But there has been something that's come up in the statistics. |
| 1:32.8 | And the English now identified that where basketball has been used and actually works is |
| 1:38.0 | only against certain teams. |
| 1:40.2 | And while the teams are still slowly being revealed, one of them was the Pakistani test cricket team of last year. |
| 1:47.2 | And Basbo was employed against them in almost exactly the same manner as we just saw in the ashes where it dismally failed, |
| 1:53.6 | but it actually worked very, very well from Pakistan. |
| 1:56.5 | So what the new, I guess, edict is with applying Basball is that it can be applied, |
| 2:01.6 | but only when a team is preconditioned to being beaten by it. |
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