England lost the second Ashes test in Brisbane by eight wickets and there is talk of the end of the Bazball era. While the idea of Bazball was to make Test cricket more entertaining the only people being entertained currently are the Australian crowd and media.
Jonathan Agnew is right that there is in effect no Plan B. Players who are performing badly, and there are some, can’t be dropped and replaced because there are no replacements immediately available.
Yet as my friend Ian Marriott, who watches a lot more cricket than I do, notes the real crisis in English and Welsh cricket is at the top. In the same week that England have been significantly underperforming in Test cricket an important announcement was made about the short form Hundred series for 2026.
The best team in the Hundred have been the Oval Invincibles. However with Corporate money coming into the competition Oval Invincibles have been renamed MI London The men’s and women’s franchises become the sixth and seventh under the Mumbai Indians (MI) brand, joining teams in the IPL, Women’s Premier League, Major League Cricket, SA20 and ILT20.
The Hundred is the competition that the England and Wales Cricket Board have promoted above all. It has bought much needed money into the game but it is part of the global branding of cricket by Corporate Capitalism. It is not about putting out the best England cricket teams, as events in Australia are underlining. Without the flagship national team performing the rest of cricket certainly at a County level will suffer, the reverse of what the ECB claim they are doing.
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