Pioneering Excellence In The Field of Delayed Punchlines (2025) - Bazball
My annual award for the best comedy moment. This year: it's 2025
Bazball has already won one of these awards, back in 2022, in a pre-newsletter era, when I took what I still feel, three years later, was a pretty nuanced and fair look at the entire phenomenon. Especially considering it was in the framework of a stupid made-up comedy award that I was giving it.
I reflected upon my own Bazball scepticism and where I’d seemingly got things wrong. I mused upon the successes of Stokes and McCullum and whether those successes were built upon a sustainable foundation. I acknowledged that my annoyance with some of the more enthusiastic acolytes of this bold new cricketing cult had less to do with the cricketing tactics themselves and more with the aforementioned enthusiasm of those aforementioned acolytes. (This was six months before shameful ‘Bazball is a cult’-latecomer Barney Ronay famously joined me on the bandwagon.) Look, don’t settle for my vague recap of what I wrote. Click through and read for yourself. I’ll wait.
So, what has Bazball done to deserve a follow-up award here in the far-flung present of 2025? Well… I think it suffices to quote the famous Ben Stokes-Moeen Ali SMS conversation from 2023:
‘Ashes?’
‘lol’
Thank you, Bazball. A three-year set-up for an eleven-day punchline, filtered through a spicy combination of not enough preparation, too much preparation and a stag-do Noosa holiday?
‘Ashes?’-‘lol’, indeed. Nicely played, one and all. Worthy two-time winners.
Now let’s get to work on that JLball variant I proposed back in 2022.
Previous years’ awards can be found at the bottom of this page: https://www.liebcricket.com/forty-funniest-cricketers-of-all-time.html