Let's hope Brizball can stay in fashion

THIS is not obviously the time to be talking balls – the Twickenham elite have cornered that particular market – but the question demands to be asked: is Brizball the union game’s version of Bazball?

- CHRIS HEWETT

And if the answer is “yes”, will the bewilderingly bold attacking mindset currently in vogue down Ashton Gate way survive the kind of trials and tribulations recently suffered by England’s cricketers in such faraway venues as Rawalpindi and Hamilton?

If we are stretching a point by suggesting that the high-risk, high-reward nature of the rugby played by Bristol since their miserable Champions Cup defeat in Connacht a little under a year ago has its roots – its Joe Roots? – in the white-flannelled doctrine of Ben Stokes and company, we are by no means in danger of snapping the elastic. Stokes would recognise a hell of a lot in the West Country side’s approach, and he’d love it even more.

Like Bazball, this Brizball business has a surface beauty all of its own. To the rugby eye, the first-half performance at Leicester last weekend was so picture-perfect, it might have been conceived and realised in an artist’s studio rather than trialled and errored on a training pitch in three feet of winter mud. But if we look a little deeper, we can also see some logic at work. This is less about playing pretty than about placing the opposition under maximum pressure at every turn, in every conceivable situation.