On the eve of the first Test against South Africa at Lord’s, England skipper Ben Stokes backed his team to carry on playing the aggressive brand of cricket that they have displayed this home summer.
Ever since Brendon McCullum and Ben Stokes assumed the roles of the head coach and captain, respectively, England have performed exceptionally well in the longest format. Under their leadership, the English team has played 4 Tests at home and won all of them while chasing down a target of more than 250.
While Proteas captain Dean Elgar has suggested that England’s ultra-aggressive approach with the bat – termed as ‘Bazball’ – is unsustainable, Stokes made it clear that they will not waiver from their plans.
“The opposition seems to be doing a lot of the talking at the moment about it,” Stokes told reporters on Tuesday (August 16). “We just concentrate on what we do. We’ve got a style of play, they’ve got a style of play.
“At the end of the day, it’s bat against the ball and whoever plays best over a test match is most likely to win. For me, it’s just about reiterating the points that we were making at the start of the summer – our mindset, attitude and everything like that – about how we go out and play our cricket.”
Most of the England Test cricketers are playing white-ball cricket lately, with their last coming against India in early July.
Stokes hopes that they can quickly get back into gear in the traditional format.
“It has felt like we’ve been a really long time away from each other – obviously, there has been a lot of different cricket, different formats played – so there is a real excitement for me to get back in there, see everybody, and reminding everybody about what we’ve achieved and sticking to our guns,” he said.
“It’s about making sure that five-week period doesn’t mean we’ve lost our venom. It would be easy to have so long away to almost forget the place we managed to find ourselves in.”
(With Reuters inputs)
