The Pundits’ Folly: Why The Ashes Is Already Decided

Musings on has-beens and what will be, from an anonymous knighted former England Test cricket captain

As I write this column, the first Test of the 2025/26 Ashes is due to begin in a little over 24 hours. And yet, in a very real sense, the outcome of not just this Test, but the entire series, is already decided.

I refer of course to the block universe theory or ‘eternalism’. Those of us who’ve studied physics and philosophy at any depth - and I had the pleasure of attending several fascinating seminars on the subject at Trinity - understand that time is not what it appears. The future is not some unwritten void waiting to be filled by our actions. It’s as real and fixed as yesterday.

Past, present, and future all exist, in a cosmological sense, simultaneously. We simply experience them sequentially due to our limited perception.

Which means, of course, that the result of this Ashes series is already determined. It exists right now, as immutable as the 2005 Ashes or the 1882 original. This, in turn, implies that those former England players - or ‘has-beens’ to use Stokes’ rather blunt terminology - wringing their hands about preparation are trying to influence something that cannot be influenced.

The critics of the England team’s build-up operate under a charmingly naive view of causation. They believe that warm-up matches will somehow affect the Test results. That practice will change outcomes. That preparation alters destiny.

It’s rather sweet, really. Like children believing they can affect the weather by wishing hard enough.

Fata viam invenient - fate will find a way. The Romans understood this. Our modern critics, despite their considerable experience at the crease, do not.

Those former greats played their careers believing they were in control. That their preparation mattered. That their nets sessions altered results. One hates to disillusion them, but they were experiencing an illusion of agency. The outcomes were fixed. They simply didn’t know it.

Stokes, in contrast, does.

Now, one suspects, given his northern England upbringing, that he grasps this knowledge instinctively, rather than as the result of any higher-level study. He has, presumably, never read Einstein, nor spent a tedious term attempting to explain Minkowski spacetime to an entirely bewildered set of undergraduates. It is exceedingly unlikely that the England captain can talk an educated fan through the differences between the special and general theories of relativity. He would not, one imagines, know his Hessian from his Jacobian, if I may indulge in a little tensor calculus humour.

And yet, much like the acclaimed Northamptonshire scribbler, Alan Moore, whose funny-book character ‘Doctor Manhattan’ espouses the fixed nature of time for his illiterate fans, there is a primitive understanding of the concept in play, which, in its own way, is almost as impressive. But while Moore grinds away via the dubious outlet of the so-called ‘graphic’ novel, Stokes paints his instinctive understanding of chronogeometry on the rather more refined tapestry of cricket.

For ‘Bazball’™ represents the acceptance of cosmic truth. We cannot change the outcome. So why play cautiously? Why prepare anxiously? Why do anything other than express ourselves fully?

Traditional cricket is rooted in the delusion of control. Block this ball, prepare for that spell, practice this shot - all attempts to influence an outcome that’s already determined. ‘Bazball’™ abandons this fantasy entirely.

This England team plays with positive intent not because it will change the result - nothing can change the result - but because it’s the only honest way to play. Attack because attack is who we are. The outcome is fixed, our expression of self is the only variable within our control.

And so, why not limit one’s warm-ups for this series to a jaunty hit-out at the quaintly colonial Lilac Hill?

Contrast with the Australians, who have been grinding away in warm-up matches with their characteristic ignorance of the four-dimensionality of spacetime. Utilitarian first-class fixtures. Dreary, sweat-stained nets sessions. Joyless physical conditioning. All in the belief that it will affect the outcome.

And what have they achieved? They’ve injured Josh Hazlewood. Their strike bowler, broken before the first ball is delivered.

Now, of course, from an eternalist perspective, Hazlewood was always going to be injured. This injury exists in the block universe as surely as his ultimately futile first innings spell at Headingley in 2019. But the delicious irony is that the Australians have, quite literally, hamstrung themselves when they’d have been better off - or, at least, no worse off - by doing nothing.

It betrays a lack of philosophical sophistication, not dissimilar to those frenzied pundits littering the pre-series press with their tiresome prognostications. Australia to win 3-1. England’s ‘Bazball’™ to falter. The usual tedious forecasting. But prediction is a philosophical error.

You cannot predict something that already exists. You can only fail to know it. The series result is as real as the Norman Conquest or one’s most recent haircut. We simply haven’t experienced it yet.

So when someone asks me to predict the Ashes, I decline. Not because I lack confidence - I have absolute faith in ‘Bazball’™ - but because prediction implies uncertainty about something that is already certain. It’s epistemologically confused.

Que sera, sera - what will be, will be. One rarely thinks of Doris Day as a fourth-dimensional theoretical physicist, but there you are.

The result exists. Our preparation cannot alter it. Anxiety cannot prevent it. Our opponents prepare fretfully because they think they can change things. Stokes attacks regardless because he knows he can’t. One is delusion. The other is enlightenment.

And so England approach this series liberated by that knowledge. We’ll play ‘Bazball’™ not to win - we cannot make ourselves win - but to be ourselves. If the outcome is fixed, what remains? Only authenticity. Only a commitment to being ourselves regardless of what the universe has ordained. And if being ourselves results in victory, as I suspect it will, we’ll accept that fate as we’d accept any other.

And so while the ‘has-beens’ fret, and the Australians mock, and the pundits speculate, Stokes says: we’ll play our way regardless. We cannot control fate, but we can control whether we face it authentically or cravenly. The critics want us to hedge, to prepare, to be cautious. That’s cowardice dressed as wisdom. Instead, we shall attack regardless. That’s courage dressed as recklessness.

I know which I prefer.

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This former England captain and his Australian counterpart will be offering their thoughts after each Test. To fully access them (and all my other coverage of the upcoming Ashes), please consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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