In the end perhaps it was for the best. An England win at this stage would have gone against the brand. Victory is off-message. Victory is confusing for consumers. The brand is “disaster”. The look is ageing, haunted, rock-bottom. Defeat brings engagement, eyeballs, heat. Push the buttons on lose for now. Reinvent lose.
England duly did so in Ahmedabad by losing slightly better. This was their sixth defeat in seven matches, but a defeat that felt almost like a win at this World Cup because it wasn’t a shellacking.
The most poignant moment was probably the walk. Jonny Bairstow has one of the great cricketing walks: the choppy, brittle steps, the shoulders flexed, head held with a sense of bone-china dignity.
It is above all a deeply expressive walk, even if the emotion expressed tends to be the same every time: base notes of naked fury, leavened with a sense of deeply felt worldly betrayal. To his credit Bairstow tends to apply this combination pretty evenly to every available scenario, from match-turning hundred to cruelly feathered World Cup golden-duck-strangle soundtracked by hyena-laughing yellow shirts.
And here the walk seemed to capture the essence of this toxic fever dream of an England World Cup. It arrived at 6.27pm, one ball in to the innings batting second in the warm, soupy evening air. No doubt there are deep structural causes to be unravelled behind England’s underperformance. In between, it might be best just to sit back and enjoy the moments of farce.
The stadium had already fallen silent, Mitchell Starc halted in his run-up by a lone figure wandering through the empty seats under the massive Narendra Modi sign at the Massive Narendra Modi Sign End, showpiece of the Massive Narendra Modi Stadium, beating heart of the Narendra Modi World Cup. Perhaps the Board of Control for Cricket in India could just table a motion to rebrand all future Men’s ODIs as MODIs. It seems unlikely anyone would object.
Starc ran in, legs pumping in that lovely, loose way, like a champion surfer galloping into the tide. The ball was leg side. Bairstow leant into it and turned his wrists, fell just a touch to the off side and edged fine to Josh Inglis.
It was a strange moment, as Australia’s players leapt and pranced and Marais Erasmus mustered a muted little jab of the finger, a mercy killing. Starc fell to his haunches and laughed. Bairstow began the walk.
It would be wrong to say England’s faint hopes of keeping their World Cup pulse alive walked off with him. They made a decent fist of chasing Australia’s middling 286. But it felt like a key snapshot, a moment that will linger on in freeze-frame.
Bairstow has been one of the spirit animals of this England white-ball team. On numbers, gongs and big moments won, he is arguably England’s best ever opener in the format, with Graham Gooch waggling his bat and muttering through his moustache at the other end.
Perhaps the most endearing thing about Bairstow is that while he may be a perfect modern player, with a professional life lived out in the beaming inanity of the sport’s new musical theatre, he still expresses in his movements and moods the essence of cricket’s deep soul, which is pain, fear and abasement before the cruellest of gods. The feather, the whooping, the walk: it still felt epic.
A duck took his World Cup tally to 141 in seven innings. But there is a lesson here too. Bairstow recently turned 34. This is his first really dud run. He still looks on the way back physically, and a touch too tightly coiled. Good Bairstow has a balance of destructive energies. Good Bairstow imagines cruel fate, rather than actually having it happen to him.
How much does he have left? One more T20 World Cup next year, rested and recovered? These are still very good England players: old England players, but also exhausted-looking England players, wrung out and exposed, still gamely carrying that flag. The players may carry out the stage directions. But it’s always about the structure, the details, the demands, the push from the top. You get the feeling what Bairstow really, really needs is a rest and a little normal life.
This was at least a return to a normal contest. England picked the same team. Maybe SaveAs+print is just a bit quicker. David Willey played despite having just announced his retirement. Willey is right to feel a little hard done by. His record is good. He lifted a trophy last year. The gulf between his professional lot and the unceasing laurels, the endless sacks of cash bestowed on, say, Sam Curran seems disproportionately vast.
Ahmedabad was brutally hot at midday, the Modi well stacked with spectators. It is an odd stadium, steadfast in its refusal to add even the slightest design detail, and unremarkable in every sense apart from its vast and pointless scale. Welcome to the last great wilderness, the Narendra Modi Stadium upper tiers. There are surely environmental rules on housing so much needless plastic.
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Put in to bat, Australia surged along vaguely. Mark Wood ran in with a thrilling sense of menace. England kept chipping away. Australia kept chipping away. The stadium gurgled and purred happily. Squint a little and this felt like another timeline, another England World Cup.
In reply Ben Stokes found some batting rhythm. Moeen Ali seemed almost poised to almost grab the moment. In reality it was always too far, too much, too long, another step in the continuing collapse into entropy that no one saw coming, but which now seems painfully clear.
