Bodyline, Underarm, and Bazball: How Three Radical Ideas Changed Cricket Forever
Cricket likes to present itself as a game of tradition, but some of its most important moments came from captains and coaches deliberately breaking with convention. Three episodes in particular — separated by nearly a century — show how a single tactical idea, taken to its logical extreme, can force the entire sport to rewrite its rules or its identity.
Bodyline: cricket's first tactical scandal
During England's 1932–33 tour of Australia, captain Douglas Jardine devised a plan specifically to neutralise Don Bradman, the Australian batter whose extraordinary scoring in the previous Ashes series had made him close to unplayable by conventional means. Jardine's fast bowlers, led by Harold Larwood, were instructed to bowl short-pitched deliveries aimed at the batter's body, with a cluster of fielders packed on the leg side waiting for the defensive shot a batter is forced into when protecting themselves. It became known as "leg theory," and to almost everyone outside the England camp, as Bodyline.
The tactic worked in the narrowest cricketing sense — England won the series — but it provoked outrage in Australia bordering on a diplomatic incident, with accusations that the approach was less about getting batters out and more about physically intimidating them. The controversy was severe enough that cricket's laws were changed afterward to explicitly limit the number of fielders allowed behind square on the leg side, closing off the tactic for good. Bodyline remains the clearest example in the sport's history of a single series forcing a permanent change to the laws of the game, and it's still invoked whenever a fast-bowling attack is accused of prioritising aggression over fair play.
The underarm ball: a legal delivery nobody could forgive
Nearly fifty years later, in a 1981 One Day International between Australia and New Zealand, Australian captain Greg Chappell instructed his brother Trevor to bowl the final delivery of the match underarm, rolling it along the ground so it was effectively impossible to hit for the six runs New Zealand needed to tie. It was, at the time, a legal delivery. It was also almost universally condemned as against the spirit of the game, drawing criticism from as high as the Australian Prime Minister and souring relations between the two cricketing nations for years.
The incident is remembered today less for what it changed tactically — underarm bowling was banned outright shortly afterward — and more for what it revealed about cricket's culture. Unlike Bodyline, there was no argument that Chappell's tactic was dangerous or against a specific law; it was legal cricket that simply offended what most people felt the game was supposed to be. That distinction, between what's allowed and what's acceptable, has shaped debates about gamesmanship in cricket ever since.
Bazball: rewriting Test cricket's risk calculus
The most recent example is far less controversial but arguably just as disruptive. When Brendon McCullum was appointed England's Test coach in 2022, alongside new captain Ben Stokes, the team adopted an approach nicknamed "Bazball" (after McCullum's nickname "Baz") built around scoring extremely quickly and taking risks that most Test teams had spent decades trying to avoid. Declarations came earlier, batters attacked bowling that previous generations would have played cautiously, and England began chasing improbable totals in a fraction of the time such chases traditionally took.
Bazball didn't require a law change, because it didn't break any rules — it simply challenged an unwritten consensus about how Test cricket "should" be played, similar in spirit to the underarm incident but pointed in the opposite direction, toward entertainment rather than containment. Results were mixed against the strongest opposition, but the approach undeniably changed how other teams thought about tempo and declarations in Test cricket, and it's now commonly referenced whenever a team scores unusually fast in the longest format.
What connects them
Bodyline, the underarm ball, and Bazball sit at very different points on cricket's spectrum of acceptability — one forced a change to the laws, one was banned outright, and one is celebrated as innovation. What they share is a captain or coach identifying that the conventional way of playing left something on the table, and being willing to take the sport's reaction as the cost of exploiting it. Cricket's history is often told through its great individual innings and bowling spells, but its rules and culture have arguably been shaped just as much by these moments where someone decided the accepted way of playing wasn't the only way.