The Australians’ Fatal Misapprehension: A Meditation on ‘Bazball’™

The first in a series of regular Ashes newspaper columns from an anonymous knighted former England Test cricket captain

Those of us privileged to witness the 2010/11 Ashes and the remarkable feats of Andrew Strauss’s side, recall it with considerable fondness. These heroes - for that is what they indubitably were - tamed the old enemy in a manner rarely seen, inflicting three innings victories on the hapless home side as they retained the urn in spectacular fashion. Furthermore, I had the pleasure of dining with several of them at a celebratory luncheon following their return, and can attest to their character as well as their cricket.

Unfortunately, the success of this all-conquering Ashes team ironically blinded their successors, leading to some unfortunate results on subsequent tours - details over which we shall draw a charitable veil, much as one might at a poorly attended dinner party.

Now, however, it is the Australians blindly clinging to the past, caressing those historic victories like war medals from conflicts no longer relevant. To which I respond, tempora mutantur, gentlemen.

For the Australian approach to cricket is rather like Victorian industrialism - effective in its time, but a sepia daguerreotype of a bygone era. Cummins’ men play Gradgrindian cricket - all facts, figures, occupying the crease. Their problem is fundamentally one of imagination. They can conceive of grinding out runs, but not of creating them. Rather sad to witness, really.

In contrast, our team of champions have embraced what Keats called ‘negative capability’ - the capacity to exist in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts. An all-encompassing philosophy that embraces an entire worldview, but which, for the convenience of the uneducated masses, has been simplified to a single disyllabic term. To wit, ‘Bazball™’.

And perhaps it is the crass simplicity of this moniker that leads the superficial Australian mind to mistake such a revolutionary sporting philosophy for mere recklessness. As we used to discuss at Cambridge, positive intent is essentially a Hegelian synthesis of aggression and intelligence. Or, to put it in terms more readily understood, audentes fortuna iuvat - fortune favours the bold. Something the Australians, with their pedestrian mentality, simply cannot fathom.

But, of course, the most delicious irony, and a factor that the Australians, with their incessant mockery, cannot process, is that our inspirational captain, Ben Stokes, was actually born in their tattooed neck of the woods. To be precise, New Zealand, which is rather the more refined corner of the antipodes - in its own way, almost a mirror image of Britain, a small island (or two), standing bold and defiant against the larger continent that might, to a casual and unthinking observer, be expected to cast a formidable shadow. And yet, and yet…

For such tactical sophistication to emerge from someone born in Christchurch and raised in Durham, of all places, rather makes one contemplate divine intervention. It’s rather like discovering one’s plumber has read Proust - delightful, if somewhat improbable.

Or, for those of a more Darwinian bent, Stokes’ antipodean origins resolve the nature vs. nurture debate in favour of English cricket’s civilising influence. It is this latter influence that justifies the claims that ‘Bazball™’, and its inevitable reclamation of the urn, is a prototypically English achievement.

The Australians love to trumpet that they ‘retained’ the Ashes in 2023, as if clinging to a draw, in a manner not unlike limpets to the surface of a rock, as they are battered by the relentless tides of an irrepressible force crashing against them with ever-increasing ferocity, represents some manner of triumph. It rather reveals their limited ambitions, doesn’t it?

Yes, we dropped the first two Tests - finding our feet, working out the frequencies, if you will. Rather like the first movement of a symphony before the themes fully develop.

But once we’d found our rhythm at Headingley? Unstoppable. We won the final three Tests. For though the record books show only two victories, the fact remains that we’d have also taken the win at Old Trafford had the Manchester weather not intervened. For the Australians to claim ownership of the urn based on the vagaries of a stubborn low pressure system is poor sport, indeed.

In what passes for the antipodean heart, Pat Cummins and his men know this. They retained the Ashes on a technicality and British meteorology. Yet, as Shelley wrote, ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ We were ascendant. The momentum was ours - and momentum, as Newton (another Cambridge man) taught us, is conserved.

Can the Australians, then, reverse the momentum of the ‘Bazball™’ers, twenty-seven months on? Surely even the most hardened and ill-educated of Australian supporters must have their doubts, given that their selectors seem to be of the mistaken belief that this is a series of testimonial matches. One half expects a parade lap and commemorative plate presentation before play commences for Khawaja, Smith, Lyon, et al, with one eye on a grim and desperate battle against Father Time in addition to the even more formidable challenge of a mighty England side in their prime, led by the Promethean Stokes, a perfect synthesis of experience and physical capability.

Come this 2025/26 Ashes, they’ll understand what 2023 truly showed - that once ‘Bazball™’ finds its rhythm, only acts of God can stop it. And the Almighty, one suspects, has rather better things to do than rescue ageing Australian cricketers from their inevitable humiliation. Sic transit gloria mundi - thus passes worldly glory. And thus, one rather suspects, will pass Australia’s hold on the urn.

They scraped through in 2023 thanks to Manchester’s climate, but this time? This time there’s an entire series to complete what we began. And I rather doubt even the Australian Cricket Board has sufficient influence over the Bureau of Meteorology to arrange another convenient deluge of Mancunian proportions. Though knowing them, they’ll try.