Everyone talks about big first hours. That’s because first hours need all the hype they can get. Nobody needs to sell the last hour of a Test match. And particularly not a Test on this epic, colossal, orchestral scale, a Test that shook you from its very first ball and never stopped shaking.
Take the devastating tension of a tight Twenty20, the ebb and grapple of a really good one-day international, and then make it big. Stretch it out over almost a week. Throw in some random weather phenomena, enough booze to fill the Caspian, batters forced to bowl and bowlers forced to bat. Cricket: good. Worth your time. Might just catch on.
That was the only firm conclusion we could draw from these five tempestuous, hysterical days in Birmingham. For the victorious, exhausted Australia there will be a temptation to see this as vindication: almost a moral as well as a sporting triumph, proof of the time-honoured virtues of ticker, patience, trust in the process. But that would be to ignore the fact they only turned this game round when Pat Cummins threw caution to the wind and hurled the bat at everything that moved. When they went – to coin a phrase – a little bit Bazball.
As for the demoralised, exhausted England: well, whatever you think about them is by definition wrong. Remember, Bazball is largely indifferent to your staid, hidebound trivialities like victory and defeat. It is no more possible to defeat Bazball than it is to defeat carbon, or the notion of love, or the number five. So what if they looked bereft of ideas in the field and kept throwing their wickets away when well set? Something something pitch. Something something the little kid within. Something something Test cricket is the winner here.
The bitter irony here was that England were defeated largely on their own terms. Whatever nebulous cricketing principles their new style of play embodies, it probably doesn’t incorporate trying to win a nail-biting Test with seven fielders on the boundary. England batted with brio and panache, but Usman Khawaja still scored more runs than any of them.
With the game within their grasp, the kings of the fourth‑innings surge succumbed to the sort of blistering counterattack that might have been transcribed from the pages of Brendon McCullum’s copybook, were he to possess a copybook, which we can be fairly certain he does not.
England lost the battle of ideas, but they also lost the battle of the breaks. The rain on the third afternoon came and went at the worst possible time for them, a key period during which Australia claimed both their openers. The fast, flat pitch Ben Stokes ordered was, quite frankly, a mess. The only way of prising out wickets on it was through big turn, big pace or a litany of batting errors. As the margins tightened in the final session, with Moeen Ali failing to appear after the tea break, it became clear they had none of them.
So what do you do? You have to reach for the bag of mystery intangibles. Ollie Robinson’s glare. Stuart Broad pumping up the crowd. Field settings that look more like interview panels. Funky choices, such as Joe Root bowling 13 overs in a row or deciding not to take the new ball until it is too late.
Often Australia would succumb to the showmanship: Cameron Green and Alex Carey played silly shots to get out. Stokes, trudging in with the old ball to bowl his little 81mph lozenges, cleaned up Khawaja with a brilliantly disguised leg-cutter. But over a long enough x-axis, the arc of Ashes cricket bends towards logic. England had precious little of it when it mattered most.
Bazball – if it is founded on anything – is founded on the idea that cricket is an energy as well as a mass, a game of magic as well as materials, a game of visions and hallucinations. When you can will yourself to chase down 378, perhaps you also start to believe that you can will the skin on Moeen’s spinning finger to heal, that you can will your battery of 82mph fast bowlers to bowl out the best team in the world, that the magic moment will simply drop in your lap when you need it. Meanwhile, let’s just remind ourselves of McCullum’s playing record against Australia: one win, 13 defeats, and a trouncing in a World Cup final.
Perhaps it is too much of a simplification to say England play cricket as they would like it to be, while Australia play the game that actually exists. But it was certainly true here. England played the game of sprites and vibes; Australia played the surface and the ball that was bowled and however you want to spin it a defeat on your own terms is still a defeat.
Now comes the real test. Do England want to wake up? Or do they want to keep dreaming?
