The month in cricket No.2

Andrew Miller offers a mea culpa of sorts for coining a term which has taken on a life of its own but hasn’t been embraced by the man it was inspired by

ANDREW MILLER

Wisden Cricket Monthly columnist, UK editor of ESPNcricinfo and former editor of The Cricketer @miller_cricket

A  flurry of messages came my way around the start of last month – all of them a variation on the same theme: “So it was you, you bastard …” To be clear, none of these came directly from Brendon McCullum or Rob Key, although you sense they would have shared the sentiment had they known where to direct their ire. For despite overseeing England’s most captivating run of Test performances since the 2005 Ashes, neither head honcho seems particularly grateful for the catch-all phrase that has been adopted to describe their rebooted fortunes.

“I don’t have any idea what ‘Bazball’ is… I don’t really like that silly term that people are throwing out there,” McCullum declared in an interview on SEN; to which Key later added on Sky Sports: “It’s not our term, and it devalues what those guys have done.”