It’s Not Just Cricket

In the summer of 2022 I decided, on a whim, to purchase a ticket for the fifth day of the England versus New Zealand test match at Trent Bridge. Even before the test had begun, I had a feeling that it might go to the final day, a rarity in test cricket, so was a worthwhile punt at twenty quid.

As it happened, thanks to high scoring and weather delays, it did, and Trent Bridge decided to open its gates for free, so I got a day in the sun, my ticket money refunded and watched as England chased a very challenging total of 299 to win.

It should have been a challenge anyway. But some incredible batting, with Jonny Bairstow creating carnage with 136 runs from 92 balls, meant that England coasted to victory in the last day of what was described afterwards as one of the most entertaining matches of all time. With 225 fours and 24 sixes (it felt like Bairstow hit most of them in that final afternoon) the teams set a new cricketing record for the most boundaries hit in a single match.

As value for money went, it couldn’t get much better. I went home slightly burnt and not entirely sober, but having thoroughly enjoyed my day in the sun, although probably not as much as Young Jonny Bairstow had. England could have easily fallen short, and it wouldn’t have lessened the occasion one jot. I might have felt a little deflated if they had, but that would have been fleeting against the knowledge that I’d witnessed something special.

It was also the day that ‘Bazball’ – courtesy of captain, Ben Stokes, and moreover, coach Brendon McCullum, was truly unleased on the English public; a new, swashbuckling style where risks were taken and, by and large, rewarded.

It felt poignant, given that last Monday - at the same venue and against the same opponents - another free-for-all fifth day saw the end of Stokes’s tenure, and probably the end of Bazball too. England lost in a muddled display that was filled with risk and barely any of the rewards. I’d contemplated going but listened to TMS instead. The fans seemed to be in good voice, despite the team’s widely fluctuating fortunes compared to four years earlier.

It made me wonder. What do fans really want?

Bazball is / was an interesting concept. It was, seemingly, an attempt by the incoming McCullum, and the new captain, to change test cricket from a slow, ponderous (although not necessarily in a bad way) game, into a faster and more entertaining one. Essentially, while being about playing with freedom, it was also a way of speeding the match up considerably.

Runs were scored at much faster rates, shortening games or at least guaranteeing a winner (a lot of test matches are drawn). It was also described as a way of playing that ‘risked defeat if that meant there was also a higher chance of winning.’ All or nothing.

They readily accepted that it didn’t always work, and that when it didn’t the wheels might come off in spectacular fashion, but it was always entertaining and – from a fan’s perspective at least – a riveting watch either way.

England won far more than they lost to begin with, but opponents gradually worked it out and wins dried up. Crucially, Bazball didn’t help England capture The Ashes a year later, nor the 2025 home series against India. Both were drawn 2-2. They were the two best teams in the world, admittedly, but they were a home series in which England would usually come out on top. But it also meant that England had won one of the best matches ever in 2022, then been a part of two of the best series’ ever played in 2023 and 2025.  

By contrast, in 2024, England’s hard-and-fast-approach had bludgeoned both West Indies and Sri Lanka in one-sided contests at the end of a summer shortened by a white-ball World Cup.

Mixed Results

If 2022 had suggested that fans could have it all (wins and entertainment), then the three years that followed offered a more realistic outcome. There was the full-on swings and roundabouts of 2023 and 2025, where results were mixed but the entertainment levels were dialled up to 11, sandwiching a 2024 summer where results were very strong, but where entertainment could never reach the same levels.

But I’d wager that the winning season was the least favourite of the fans who watched in the grounds, or on TV, over those four summers.

This is down to spectacle. A little like another sport I love, tennis, there is something so much better about a game where it’s so evenly matched and goes all the way to a deciding set. But it’s probably the same in all sports. We might think we prefer – for instance – a straight-forward 3-0 win for the England football team, but was there a better game than the Euro 24 semi-final against The Netherlands when we won with a last-minute goal? That game stays with you, longer than the routine victory over Senegal at the 2022 World Cup, even though the latter was a much more assured performance; arguably the best under Gareth Southgate.

Test cricket is designed to be close. It ideally needs to be. The five days create changing weather and pitch conditions, and a war of attrition is part of the appeal. But with so few countries playing it, and so many short forms of the game, it is a contest that suffers from more than the occasional existential crisis or two.

With Bazball, messers McCullum and Stokes were trying to reinvigorate it; possibly for the good of the game as much as it was for English cricket. In the smouldering wreckage of Monday’s defeat, it was being consigned to history. ‘Bazball dies where it all began’ said ex-England captain, and renowned cricket commentator and writer, Michael Atherton. I think many a cricket puritan will agree with him and be pleased that it has.

But is it too easy to let results get in the way of a good story?

True, England might have lost their way a bit, as well as their captain, after this latest test, but was the attempt to make the game a more interesting spectacle for the fans – even at the possible behest of results – a negative? Or something we should be glad to see the back of?

In the short term, many will say yes. But that’s not only with the benefit of hindsight but also the view of a lot of people steeped in the game’s more sedate traditions. Not that it’s easy to argue with them on the basis of performances, but player and captain (respectively) turned commentators, Jonathan Agnew and Michael Vaughan, really didn’t like Bazball from the off and have rather been waiting – perhaps too eagerly at times - for its demise.

It has made England weaker, in the long run, is their argument. But they had won only one test-match in 17 beforeBazball was introduced, so it was a breath of fresh air at the time. The exhilarating run chases of 277, 299, 296 and 378 runs of that summer of 2022 broke all kinds of records, and nobody seemed to be complaining too much at the time.

When England lost – which they inevitably did after that first year - they were suddenly brainless, the commentators said. Bazball, it transpired, was only any good if you win.

But are we also guilty of just seeing what we want to see?

Testing Times

Test cricket can be boring. Long days of watching batters bat slowly, and bowlers toil on flat pitches is certainly an acquired taste. Some people love it; some can’t imagine anything worse. I’d imagine the younger audience falls into that latter category. My kids think Twenty20 is way too long.

Maybe, at the time they came in, England’s new leadership duo were on the right track and maybe the sport badly needed a shot in the arm and to look towards the next generation of fans.

But the antidote to this is that test cricket has endured for 150 years. If Bazball was introduced because there was a feeling that the game was still being played in the same way as it was at the very start, and that there was scope for change, but then maybe the reason it has endured is because it was played that way. That’s the ‘test’ in a test match. It’s incredibly difficult to say for sure, and comparing four years against a hundred and fifty isn’t exactly apples with apples.

The question remains though. What do the fans really want?

This is possibly a question we can’t ever answer if Bazball is dead.

The traditionalists will say that it was a doomed attempt to change a game that didn’t need to change, and they’d be right. From their point of view at least.

But would it, in time, have also introduced new people to the sport; people who may not have gone near it when it was played in the traditional way? For a short while, cricket saw an influx of youngsters who were hitting the ball into the stands, happy in the knowledge that it wasn’t going to impede their enjoyment or their career. Will that now change too? We might never know now. If Bazball is dead then do all the good things it did die with it too?

The problem is that we can’t see the future anywhere near as clearly as the past. Test cricket is a game that lives almost entirely in what has gone before; every match, innings and player is compared against statistics from previous games.

But there will come a time when those most resistant of any changes will no longer be around to care. And if the next generation has lost interest by then, there will be no going back.

Ben Stokes, as England Captain, will never be forgotten. Some of his achievements will still be talked about in fifty to a hundred years from now.

But it might be that one potentially vital contribution to the game – to create a new audience for test cricket’s future – will be a mere postscript; a gimmicky attempt to liven up the longest form of his sport that had a short shelf life and was eventually found out.

It’s impossible to count the people who may have been lost to this form of cricket because Bazball was judged to be a failure.

As one of my favourite days watching sport of any kind, I’ll certainly never forget that day in 2022.

But I worry that some have been too quick to.