Brendon McCullum Stunned as Travis Head Dismantles Bazball: ‘One of the Best Knocks’

Brendon McCullum will not be easily flattered but in Perth, he sounded like a coach that had just seen his kool soup turned on him. Riotous Travis Head 123 off 83 batting helped drag a hard-earned 205-run fourth-innings pursuit into the arena of a net session as Australia romped home by eight wickets in only 28.2 overs to take a 1-0 lead in the series.

Head made 69 out of 100 balls, a hundred that was a hard-won one on a pitch 19 wickets had fallen upon in the first day of play, and the 164-run second-innings of England seemed like a scrap well deserved. The inaugural Ashes Test completed in less than two days in over a century was to be marked by no Bazball pyrotechnics, rather by what was more or less Travball and even McCullum was forced to watch and admire.

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One of the best knocks

McCullum was happy to declare that England had got the first part right: setting a target, which he believed to be winning, on that pitch.

“I thought 200 was actually a pretty good score for us to try and defend in the last innings. But the way Travis Head played was absolutely outstanding. It’s one of the best knocks I’ve seen in a pressure situation on a tough wicket,” McCullum told TNT Sports.

Both sides had already been made known by that tough wicket. Australia had been skittled to 132 in the first innings and Mitchell Starc had ten wickets a match and Scott Boland had 4 for 33 in the destruction of England to 164 as Ben Stokes and his side attempted to counter-punch their way out of the hole.

Head replied by striking even more viciously, and with cold precision. Having been brought up to open in the stead of Usman Khawaja, he got acclimatized to the bounce, and then blew himself out, to a fifty of 36 balls and a hundred of 69, breaking 16 fours and four sixes. However, he had fallen by 123, which Australia required just 13 runs, and the Test was virtually lost to England.

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McCullum even uncovered that a few minutes before the innings had started, one of the Australian greats had advised him that the amount could be plenty.

“I spoke to Gilly (Adam Gilchrist) about five minutes before their last innings, and he said, ‘I think you guys have got 30 too many’. I said, ‘I hope so,’ but we might have needed another 230 the way that Travis played,” McCullum said.

To a coach whose England revival has been founded on the theory of taking the pressure and setting the pace, the sight of his team being torn apart by a batter who was doing precisely that, was a philosophical blow of sorts. “Fair play. We’ve always said that if someone’s able to stand up to what we throw at them, and be able to put us under pressure and deliver a performance such as that, then you have to tip your cap,” Brendon McCullum added.

In Perth, Head did not simply win a Test, he arranged an architect of Bazball to admit that, on the hardest ground of all, Australia had discovered a version that was even more explosive.

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