“If a group that you belong to has many of the following criteria, you may have cause for concern:
The group is led by one or a few individuals, charismatic, determined, domineering.
The group tends to be totalitarian, with elaborate rituals that occupy large parts of every day.
The leader(s) claim to have a special mission in life. Frequently, that mission is messianic or apocalyptic.
The group usually presents itself as innovative and exclusive, even elitist.”
Cultic Studies Journal 1986
“It feels like we won, lads”
Baz, 2023
As a general trigger warning, this article is going to involve saying the word Bazball a lot, which some readers may find distressing. Are we close to a state of total saturation yet? To that point where Bazball becomes just another nauseatingly overplayed media strand, up there with Schofield’s vape blister or Laurence Fox baking a gay cake on TikTok and sombrely throwing it off a canal barge? Because this has been the most extraordinary breaking wave.
The word Bazball was coined in May 2022 by the Cricinfo journalist Andrew Miller, ostensibly as a joke. A quick Google search now pulls up 8,270,000 results for a word that, until that point, didn’t exist. Bazball is in Hansard (MP urges government to “Bazball” some trade deals). Since the start of April the Guardian’s website alone has published 70 articles where “Bazball” gets a mention.
It is still hard to understand how an interesting niche idea – playing Test cricket more aggressively – has managed to insert itself so insistently into the popular culture, to the extent that by now the obsession with Bazball feels far more significant than anything the word itself might actually describe. Why has this happened? And what does it mean?
Mike Brearley has come up with the best explanation so far for the magnetic appeal of England’s team vibe. Bazball is a response to depression, Brearley suggested in these pages. And yes, Brearley is a psychoanalyst and to a hammer everything looks like a nail. But it also feels devastatingly true. Cricket is a cruel, isolating, capricious sport. Decades spent inside that machine have worn so many England players thin. At times Bazball just looks like a group of people just trying to make themselves feel better. There aren’t many things more relatable than that.
It is important to remember also that people do genuinely adore and admire Ben Stokes for reasons that go beyond simply being an A-grade cricketer. Here we have an elite athlete who has been able to speak openly, while still at his peak, about struggles with mental health, to embrace ideas of both “weakness” and “strength” simultaneously. It might sound simplistic, but we are often simple souls, and it is hard to overstate how uplifting this will have been for some people struggling with the same very human problems.
Plus it is impossible not to love Bazball just for the spectacle, the intensity when England are in the field, to love the way so many of the mottos and catchphrases of Bazball – Live Where Your Feet Are; Be With Us; Run Harder Into The Danger Wall – sound like discarded first draft Oasis album titles.
But it still doesn’t explain why it’s so popular. And the real reason for this is that Bazball is a cult, and cults are very attractive. This isn’t a joke, or even a criticism. Cults happen all the time. There are established patterns of cult-ism that are simply hard-wired into group behaviour. A few years ago Rick Ross, executive director of the Institute for the Study of Destructive Cults, Controversial Groups and Movements, wrote an article in the Guardian identifying 10 tell-tale cult signs, the most obvious part of which is “a charismatic leader, who increasingly becomes an object of worship”, all the more so “as the general principles that have originally sustained the group lose power”.
Well, we’ve got one of those. “The way that we played has validated our style of play,” Brendon McCullum told reporters this week. The thrust is clear. Bazball doesn’t lose. Bazball always wins, or rather wins in ways that sail above the mundanity of your value systems, your win and loss columns. It already feels a bit gauche, a bit passé and suburban even to call Edgbaston a defeat.
Other classic signs include “Absolute authoritarianism without meaningful accountability”. Or as the seven principles of Bazball put it, a less reflective environment. No negative chat, never challenge the process.
Also on the list is a “coercive persuasion or thought reform commonly called “brainwashing”. Hmm. This week England’s players have just sounded, well, strange. Zak Crawley has already predicted another England win at Lord’s, specifically “by 150 runs”. Ollie Robinson produced a triumphant Wisden column where he celebrated Australia’s lack of answers in the face of England’s aggression (apart from, and this does feel like nit-picking, winning the match).
Other warning signs of cultism: “No tolerance for questions or critical inquiry.” Bazball presents itself as aggressively non-analytical. “We don’t worry too much about the opposition,” was McCullum’s response to what he might possibly have learned from Australia’s tactics at Edgbaston. Really? Why not? But then, as Ross notes, “the group/leader is always right”. If McCullum says “Mo did a fabulous job” and “Jonny kept really well throughout”, then just reading these words it kind of feels, somehow, like it might actually be true.
So, it’s a cult. And that’s fine because lots of things are cults. Successful sports teams often have cult tropes. Maybe if we can don, for a moment our YouTube hat of truth, all human structures, all systems of control, are cult-like. Is the MCC coaching manual basically a form of mass vaccination? Are we experiencing - whoah, hang on – an Awakening?
Perhaps, but it still doesn’t explain why Bazball is quite so popular, which has something to do with what kind of cult it is. This is, specifically, a cult of tender and bruised masculinity. It was during a press conference at Edgbaston with the most disciple-like of England’s assistant coaches that I realised what Bazball reminds me of, just a bit, is Fathers For Justice, back in the days when they used to climb Big Ben in a Spider-Man suit and make defiant gestures at news helicopters.
Something about the rawness, the sense always of being close to some emotional epiphany. There they are. Carving another six over point. Dressed as Batman. And doing it all, all of it, for doomed love. Again, this isn’t meant to poke fun. Reality is a deeply confusing, alienating place. Young people in particular are bombarded with relentless conflicting voices, with the need to fit certain norms, to reject certain norms, with finding the world can look closed or weighted against you.
There is a very obvious hunger for guidance and comfort and rules, a hunger for intense Jake Humphrey videos (which also, sorry, remind me of Bazball) where he tells you how to be a person. Why is the godawful Andrew Tate – who also, so, so sorry, reminds me of Bazball a bit - so popular? Because he draws young men into his world of certainties with small, digestible pieces of advice like do press ups and don’t vape, which is pretty much all I ever say to my own teenage sons these days. Am I on track towards owning a Bugatti? Perhaps not, because you need to take it deeper, to radiate cult energy, to offer answers and righteousness. Follow the rules. Then, when the rules don’t work, follow the energy, the feelings, the charisma.
There are a few things worth saying about where this might lead now. McCullum is right. England could easily have won the game at Edgbaston. It turned on small details. The declaration was just part of the unified theory of attack. It’s fine. England played well enough to win. They have an even chance of winning at Lord’s.
But what is it going to look like if they don’t? How would defeat affect the intersection of objective reality and cult dogma? How much deeper they can go into this thing before it starts to eat itself?
As it happens fragility and endings are also a part of this. A final key cult characteristic is “unreasonable fear about the outside world, such as impending catastrophe”. All cults are, to some degree, death cults and Bazball wears its sense of doom like a battle standard, telling us at every opportunity that this world is about to end. This is their mission. We are here to save Test cricket. And we will do this by taking franchise money from December to May, playing golf during the red-ball season at home, and by never, ever saying a word in public challenging those who run the sport. Look, it definitely makes sense when Baz says it.
For now McCullum is definitely right about one thing. What we are witnessing is utterly gripping, high-grade sporting theatre; powered along by warmth, love, feelings, a fraternal sense of doom and, above all, its own delicious contradictions.
