The Ashes

[GooseWBA]

Easy to catastrophise after a defeat like that
.

But it does come down to a tremendous innings by Head. Yes you can say we should have got more runs, but in truth we could have scored another 100 and I'm not sure it would have been enough given Heads innings.

And another day Head would have mis timed one of his aggressive shots early in the innings and it might have been a very different story. And it's not like we don't have players capable of replicating what Head did.

I'm not a massive fan of how we approach test cricket, but the loss today wasn't because of the approach, it was down to an extraordinary individual batting performance.

The loss TODAY was totally down to the  players being so conditioned to playing Bazball that they are unable/incapable of adjusting their mindset to suit the match situation. Test cricket requires a pretty full skillset, something that those out there don't seem to possess. And those that did have had it knocked out of them by the leadership at the top.

But as others have pointed out, Head played an aggressive form of cricket that totally aligned with the approach England's batters are encouraged to take. He just did it better today than any of our batsmen

Like I say, I'm not a fan of this approach to test cricket and I think other test nations are far better at reigning in when necessary than we are, but that's not what happened today.

Head played aggressively in a situation in which he had licence to. He wasn't playing baseball shots in the middle order when  the game was on a knife edge.  He could swing and get the runs, if he didn't plenty of decent batsmen to come in after him and they needed 205 on a day two wicket. And he is a great batsman who is massively underrated even in Australia where he has pulled them from disaster to victory before.

Bazball does not work. So get rid of Baz.