England didn’t play Bazball throughout the three-Test series against New Zealand. Ben Duckett, for example, shifted his game closer to conventional red-ball discipline. But in the mayhem of Stokes’s retirement announcement, at the least appropriate moment imaginable (at 3.25pm, on day four of a five-day contest), England regressed not into a tactical aberration so much as a conceit: the discredited see-it-hit-it, zero-consequence anti-thinking that was supposed to have been buried in Australia.
