McCullum himself does not like the term and the New Zealand himself said there are often misconceptions around it.<\/p>\n
At times under his stewardship, some England batters have been accused of losing their wicket cheaply by taking an aggressive approach.<\/p>\n
In 2022, BBC Test Match Special pundit Michael Vaughan called a Jonny Bairstow dismissal “dumb” and “pathetic”. But McCullum has defended his tactics.<\/p>\n
“I think there’s a bit of a misconception about how we play, that we swing the bat as hard as we can, we try to take wickets and then we go for a round of golf and a few beers,” McCullum said in September 2025.<\/p>\n
“I find it slightly disrespectful to all of you guys [the players] and all of the people in the set-up who work so hard and have such clear determination of wanting to succeed, to have that so simply categorised, almost.”<\/p>\n
England white ball captain and Test vice-captain Harry Brook is among those who enjoys the approach and has been among the beneficiaries of Bazball.<\/p>\n
“We want to entertain,” he said in September 2024.<\/p>\n
Australia’s players have often downplayed Bazball and its effect on cricket.<\/p>\n
Speaking on Bazball, spinner Nathan Lyon told BBC Sport: “I don’t mind hearing about it. It’s their type of cricket. I just feel like we’ve been playing entertaining cricket for a number of years now, we just don’t need to call it a name to justify it.<\/p>\n
“I’ve seen David Warner score centuries in a session well and truly before Bazball was invented.”<\/p>\n
Former Australia wicketkeeper Adam Gilchrist recently said: “We were doing it 20 years before them. It’s just the way you play cricket. <\/p>\n
“No, it [Bazball] does not wind me up. It makes for compelling viewing. Bring it on.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"McCullum himself does not like the term and the New Zealand himself said there are often misconceptions around…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":270155,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[1721,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-270154","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-cricket","tag-cricket","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270154","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=270154"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/270154\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/270155"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=270154"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=270154"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=270154"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}