Former England captain Nasser Hussain has questioned whether England’s much-vaunted baseball revolution has delivered anything meaningfully different after another heavy Ashes defeat in Australia, claiming familiar weaknesses have resurfaced despite a radical overhaul.
England’s latest setback has been sealed An 82-run loss in the third Test at Adelaide handed Australia an unassailable 3-0 lead on Sunday and wrapped up the Ashes after just three from five matches. It was England’s first away Ashes series in the Baseball era following the appointment in 2022 of Brendon McCullum as head coach and Ben Stokes as captain.
While Hussain acknowledged the intent behind England’s transformation, he was blunt in his assessment of the outcome. Speaking on the Ashes Daily episode of the Sky Sports Cricket Podcast, Hussain said the performances on this tour looked all too familiar.
“I quite like the fact that they have done things differently in the last four years since they last sipped the Ashes,” said Hussain. “They were forward thinking. If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’re going to get the same results, so they saw that we had to do something different.”
“But really, if you came here and looked at them in the last three to four weeks, you’d think, ‘is this really that different to any other English side?’ They didn’t bat well, they didn’t pitch well, they didn’t catch well. They failed in key moments and pressure situations.”
Hussain pointed out that apart from the 2010-11 triumph under Andrew Strauss, England’s tours of Australia followed a similar pattern, regardless of personnel or philosophy. He pointed out that Joe Root had now played 17 Tests in Australia without a single win, underscoring the depth of the problem England were trying to address by re-thinking Bazball.
“That’s why there was this reassessment,” Hussain added. “But in reality, even after massive rethinking and left-field selections and ‘we’ve got to have pace’ and ‘we’ve got to have batsmen who put the bowlers under pressure’, we ended up getting exactly what we’ve had on virtually every other Ashes tour. That disappointed me because I thought it might have been a bit different this time with this opposition. It was no different.”
Former England captain Michael Atherton echoed this sense of frustration, suggesting that the context of the series made England’s failure even harder to accept. Australia were disrupted by injuries both before and during the match, yet England failed to take advantage.
“We’ve been on a lot of Ashes tours – I think this is my tenth – and we’ve seen some bad ones, some faded ones,” Atherton said. “It was actually as disappointing for me as any because I felt that England had the tools to do the job, or at least challenge, and that there were weaknesses or areas in the Australian team that needed to be exploited.”
Instead, the gritty English brand has once again faced the harsh realities of touring Australia, leaving Bazball facing nagging questions about whether philosophy alone can overcome deep-seated problems Down Under.
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Issued by:
Saurabh Kumar
Published on:
December 22, 2025
