Imagine the England Test team — all of its 11 players, along with head coach Brendon McCullum — wearing eye patches over one eye while they play their ‘Bazball’ brand of cricket.

No, one does not want to portray the English team as fictional pirates. But at the same time, it is perhaps only apt that we think of them like that because it seems their vision of cricket, particularly Test cricket, is flawed. They somehow can’t look at Test cricket in its totality. Their approach, at least most of it, is pre-conceived and not situational.

The Edgbaston Test has reignited the debate.

On the surface, there is nothing wrong with the result at Edgbaston. India played brilliantly and they deserved to win, having outplayed England in all departments of the game. But if we delve deeper, there is one question that disturbs the Test romantic — could England have saved the match?

First things first, England could not have won the game, not even with their bloated Bazball muscles, after India set them a 608-run target. After finishing the fourth day at 72/3, the hosts were left to score 536 runs on the final day of the Test. Mathematically, that’s not impossible with 90 overs to bat. But practically speaking, it’s a mountain that is yet to be scaled in over 100 years of Test cricket. Even though the English camp has boasted multiple times that they try to chase any total that is given to them, to think they could score 536 on a single day, that too on a fifth-day pitch, is not only foolish, it’s something more.

So that left the Edgbaston game with two possibilities — either India could win it, taking the remaining seven England wickets, or the match could have ended in a draw. But the problem here is England, with their current one-eyed vision of Test
cricket, perhaps do not consider a draw to be a legitimate result in the longest format of the game.

Again, there is no taking any credit away from the India bowlers, who were impeccable in their execution of plans on the final day of the Edgbaston Test. But it’s also a fact that it did not look like England were interested in saving the game.

The first two wickets to fall on Day V were of Ollie Pope and Harry Brook. Both were not dismissed while going for expansive strokes, so they cannot really be held guilty of exhibiting unrealistic aggression. Though one may question the mindset, because Brook was batting at a strike rate well above 70 when Akash Deep trapped him LBW, still these two batters will get the benefit of doubt.

But Chris Woakes? Jamie Smith?

Woakes fell while trying to pull a short ball from Prasidh Krishna. Could he have avoided yielding to such temptation, given England’s position at that stage of the game? Yes, he should have checked himself.

After Woakes fell as the seventh England wicket, Smith was joined by Brydon Carse. Shouldn’t England have tried to shut shop then? Yes. They could have failed even then, but not trying is certainly a bigger offence. Instead, Smith, flattered by his rich form, went about his shots as if the target for them was near and England were one or two wickets down.

In the 56th over of the innings, Akash Deep continuously peppered Smith with the short ball and the England keeper-batter kept going after them. It was one such attempt off the fourth ball of the over which saw him get caught at deep backward square leg.

Smith made 88 off 99 balls at a strike of 88.88. He hit nine fours and four sixes. Entertaining? Yes. Wise? No.

Test cricket gives you exclusive badges of honour that the other formats often don’t. In Tests, a slow, gritty hundred is as precious — if not more — than a fast, entertaining ton. Smith could have made better use of his good form by using the defensive blocks more than his flamboyant strokeplay. He could have tagged along a tailender with him in his fight. It was not impossible on a flat Edgbaston track. For the record, Carse, the No. 9 batter, made 38, and he averages 25.78 in Test cricket.

Test cricket has seen many gripping battles where teams have plucked out a draw from a disadvantageous situation. England themselves have a famous story to fall back on.

In the 1995-96 Johannesburg Test against South Africa, England had to chase 479 or bat out about 11 hours. England started Day V at 167/4, and were then 232/5, when Mike Atherton was joined by Jack Russell at the crease. Atherton made an epic 185
not out off 492 balls and, having opened the innings, batted for almost 11 hours. Russell made 29 not out off 235 balls and batted for 274 minutes. England finished at 351/5 and saved the Test. That draw was heroic, chivalrous and as good as a win.

Had Ben Stokes’s England taken the same route and saved the Edgbaston Test, they could have still had the upper hand going into Lord’s with a 1-0 lead. But now Shubman Gill’s Team India have them on the backfoot.

The problem is in the current England team’s mindset. Marcus Trescothick, their batting coach, while speaking after the fourth day’s play at Edgbaston, gave us a peek into how the current England dressing room thinks. It’s weirdly self-contradictory. First, Trescothick said: “We’re not stupid enough to (think) that you have to just win or lose. There are three results possible in every game that you play.” But then, he also said: “I don’t think we use that sort of language (of playing for a draw). It’s not the sort of changing room that we are... You’ve got to understand our changing room is a different type of culture in terms of what we’ve done in the past.”

That kind of answers a lot of questions... Like why there has been only one drawn match in the Bazball era, why Stokes has opted to bowl first in 10 of the 11 matches he has won the toss in England. Such an approach has given results, but now teams perhaps know how to defuse the Bazball bomb.

Geoffrey Boycott summed it up aptly in his column for The Daily Telegraph. “Batting is in the head and the brain dictates how you approach batting: what shots you attempt, what balls you leave.” That’s where England’s problem is. In the head.