On Bazball’s Resurrection and Theological Vindication
Musings on the third and fourth Ashes Tests, from an anonymous knighted former England Test cricket captain
I am not a religious man - I consider myself more a student of the Enlightenment, preferring Voltaire to the Gospels. Yet what I witnessed at Melbourne requires theological language to describe adequately.
Certain critics - lacking both imagination and understanding - have long dismissed ‘Bazball’™ as a cult. But cults are false religions, charlatan operations promising miracles they cannot deliver. What happened at Melbourne proves ‘Bazball’™ is something rather different: a bona fide religion, complete with genuine miracles. Resurrection, for instance. Which, in the true spirit of ‘Bazball’™’s fast-forward nature took a mere two days, rather than the three Scripture reports. Even in restoration, ‘Bazball’™ accelerates beyond divine timetables.
I’ll confess to being a broken man in the aftermath of Adelaide. I sat down to write my contracted piece on multiple occasions. Each time, I found myself paralysed - not by England’s defeat, which one had witnessed with depressing regularity, but by the nature of the capitulation. This wasn’t merely losing. This was murder. The England players had killed ‘Bazball’™ themselves, and on the perfect stage for its vindication.
Adelaide presented everything the philosophy required: red ball, natural sunlight, proper Test cricket on a pristine batting surface. And what did England do with this gift? Zak Crawley, in an ironically indefensible display of defence-first batting, mustered but one run from his first twenty-eight deliveries. And he was far from solitary in his cowardice. The entire team flinched and lost by eighty-two runs for their troubles.
What, precisely, was gained by such timidity if it produced identical defeat?
I couldn’t write about the Test. Language failed me. I found myself in profound mourning. ‘Bazball’™ - the philosophy I had so vigorously defended, the revolution I had ardently championed - lay dead. Not wounded. Not compromised. Dead. A kind of philosophical fratricide. Killed by those who had birthed it, abandoned in its hour of greatest need. The Ashes were gone, but even that seemed trivial in comparison to the devastation I felt at the demise of the most thrilling cricketing philosophy since Jardine’s leg theory.
I tuned into the Boxing Day Test at Melbourne with the enthusiasm of a man attending a funeral - which, in a sense, I was. The series was lost. The philosophy had fallen. What remained but to observe the corpse?
Yet like the grass on that very Melbourne pitch - which Cricket Australia claimed had grown to an unconscionable ten millimetres - ‘Bazball’™ rose again, straining and stretching for the rays of mighty Sol. England overran their hapless opponents in just two swift days of the kind of play we’ve grown to expect from Ben Stokes and his heroic disciples. Crawley, who had denied the faith at the so-called ‘city of churches’ with his twenty-eight deliveries of doubt, reclaimed his righteousness, attacking with flair, dispatching boundaries with abandon, playing with the freedom Adelaide had stolen from him. The apostle Peter is reported to have wept after his betrayal of Christ and was thereby restored. History does not record whether Crawley shed tears after his Adelaide pusillanimity, but in Melbourne he batted, and was likewise forgiven. Duckett, ever the zealot, required no redemption at all.
Nor was this a cautious rebuilding. This was the stone rolled away, the dead walking, the miracle undeniable.
One hundred and eighty-six thousand attended Melbourne across two days - an unprecedented mass witnessing something their provincial expectations couldn’t possibly have foreseen. They came smugly expecting a dead rubber, England trudging hopelessly to an inevitable fourth defeat orchestrated for their amusement. They came for their crude Boxing Day rituals - beer, the ‘Mexican Wave’, and the unexamined comfort of Australian dominance. Simple pleasures for simple minds.
They saw resurrection instead. The primeval roars of the Australian fans in attendance, reportedly, reached their zenith not for any wicket or moment of skill, but for Scott Boland - a number eleven shoehorned into the opening role - surviving the final over of the first day after fortuitously edging a single boundary. Ninety-four thousand people cheering basic competence from a tailender. Rather tells you something about Antipodean expectations. Or perhaps their desperation for any crumb of success amid the rubble of defeat. For those in Melbourne witnessed what Adelaide’s smaller crowds had not: ‘Bazball’™ in its purest form, uncompromised, victorious. Better two days of that than five days of Adelaide’s apostasy.
One observes a certain historical irony: England’s Reformation began with rejection of papal authority. England’s cricketing reformation required the same. Ollie Pope - averaging 11.25 against Australia across nine Tests - was finally removed from the XI for Melbourne. The Protestant parallel rather suggests itself.
The Australians were left utterly confounded by ‘Bazball’™’s revival. Cricket Australia’s CEO, in the aftermath, lamented that ‘short Tests are bad for business’ - as though vulgar commercialism supersedes philosophical truth. He sought to blame the groundskeeper, casting him as a Judas who had betrayed their presumed 5-0 coronation.
How characteristically Australian: to blame surfaces rather than examine substance, to scapegoat groundskeepers rather than confront their own intellectual poverty. The pitch, as pitches do, behaved identically for both sides. Only one team possessed the philosophical framework to master it.
And that is what we take forth. The series may be lost, but ‘Bazball’™ is vindicated. Better to lose maintaining one’s principles than to win having abandoned them - though Melbourne rather proves one can do both simultaneously.
Sydney now looms as epilogue rather than essential text. The story concluded at Melbourne. What follows is denouement, opportunity for those who missed the miracle to witness its afterglow. The converted need not attend. The resurrection has been proven.
Let us examine the theological mechanics more closely, for miracles deserve rigorous analysis rather than blind acceptance. Miracles, properly understood, are not violations of natural law but demonstrations of higher principles. Water into wine. Death into life. Cowardice into courage. Melbourne transformed the last of these. Adelaide had shown England’s natural state: timid, conventional, defeated. Melbourne demonstrated what happened when higher principle - ‘Bazball’™ - supplanted nature. The transformation was miraculous precisely because it reversed what seemed inevitable. Fifteen years without victory in Australia. Two days to end it. That’s not cricket. That’s theology. That’s ‘Bazball’™.
Go forth and spread the good word.
