The Ashes have taken the place of the Premier League, and suddenly "Bazball" is the word on everyone’s lips.

It takes quite something to transform a near-150-year-old sporting format without either changing the laws or introducing some sort of improved technology.

Yet this is what Bazball - named after Brendon McCullum, a former New Zealand international cricketer who has been head coach of the England Test team for about a year - just might be in the process of achieving.

Cricket - a sport which appeared singularly ill-suited to fast-paced modern lifestyles - has been a hive of innovation for two or three decades as it battled at first for survival and more recently to maximise its money-making potential.

But this creative thrust had largely omitted the longer formats of the sport, in which single matches can last as long as five days and players still break each afternoon for tea.

Bazball has now applied some of the changed assumptions about the game - notably how fast it is feasible to accumulate the currency of the sport, known as "runs" - and applied them to the long-form format still regarded by purists as cricket’s apogee: five-day international Test matches.

Cricket matches are generally composed of "overs" - six-ball salvoes delivered by a single bowler.

In short-form cricket, scoring rates of 10 runs per over have come to be seen as almost routine.

This in itself has been the result of an evolutionary process: in the early days of short-form cricket in 1969, a bowler called Brian Langford was still able to deliver eight overs, a total of 48 balls, without conceding a single run one afternoon in late-July in Yeovil, a feat utterly unthinkable today.

In Test matches, with the onus they have traditionally put on stamina and concentration over extremely long time periods, scoring rates of two or three runs per over have traditionally been accepted as reasonable; achieving a rate of four runs per over for an entire day was really going some.

Under McCullum, and Ben Stokes, his gung-ho captain, a rate of five runs per over, perhaps even more, has come to seem achievable over extended periods of even high-class bowling.

But faster scoring is merely the most obvious change of the McCullum/Stokes era.

What they seem quickly to have established is a mindset under which accepted norms, even those stretching back over decades and decades of Test matches, are routinely challenged, potentially leaving the opposition nonplussed, never quite knowing what to expect from their English adversaries.

In a sense, when Stokes on Monday scored just a single run from the first 13 balls he faced, it was as much Bazball as when England opener Zak Crawley smote the first ball of the series for four, since it was toying with Australian expectations.

Unusual field placings have become another Bazball hallmark.

Thinking about comparisons to other sports, Bazball's innovative spirit is probably closer to the emergence of Severiano Ballesteros and the way he changed perceptions of what was possible – and desirable - in golf, than a mould-breaking technical innovation such as high jumping’s Fosbury flop or tennis’s double-handed backhand.

In team-sports, points of comparison might include the way in which rugby union forwards have, in recent times, stopped heading automatically for the breakdown, but rather position themselves across the field ready to help repel, or initiate the next attack to best advantage.

The landmark tactical innovation of 1970s soccer known as "total football", under which traditional notions of positional play were rendered much more fluid in the name of exploiting space and confusing the opponent also strikes me as cut from a similar cloth to Bazball in the way that it subverted long-established norms.

Moreover, as Jonathan Wilson points out in his definitive history of football tactics, Inverting the Pyramid, what allowed the wholesale interchanges of position of total football was strenuous, aggressive pressing – and there is something very Bazball about defending while on the front foot.

Of course, if it is to change a sport for more than a brief period, any innovation has to be shown to work, to make teams who adopt it better than they otherwise would be.

Here, the Ashes confront Bazball with its sternest test.

Not only is national interest in the team’s fortunes always far more intense than for any other cricket series, but Australia just happens to be the newly minted world Test champions.

If Bazball can help make England competitive with the best team in the world, at least on home soil, then it might have a long-term future and a chance of incorporation into the tactics of other teams, especially if it increases Test match viewing figures in the process.

If David Warner, Nathan Lyon, captain Pat Cummins et al end up grinding their hosts into submission, a more conservative and traditional approach may quickly reassert itself.

So far, signs are mixed, although Bazball’s blast of fresh air has got the country talking about the team, and today’s final day of the first match of the five-Test series, in the bear-pit that is Edgbaston when it hosts an Ashes game, is set up to be a humdinger - weather permitting.