The fifth day of the fourth Test ended the same way every other in this series has begun, with England having a kickabout on the outfield. The difference, this time, was that it was lashing down with rain while they played. The only other people outdoors at Old Trafford were underneath umbrellas and for a time it seemed like England were trying to con everyone else into believing the conditions were fit for the 1pm start the umpires had promised earlier in the morning. As the rain became heavier and, one by one, more players and coaches came over to join them, it became clear it wasn’t really the point at all.
They were just out there enjoying themselves in the wet, because what else was there to do on a rainy day at Old Trafford? They looked like a group of lads on a stag do in Newquay, assistant coach David Saker the one middle-aged tagalong who is going to drink everyone under the table later in the evening.
So Australia have retained the Ashes and the best England can get out of the series now is a draw. Well, they never promised that they would win, just that they could, and told the rest of us we should enjoy watching them try. They have been saying this since the beginning, it’s just that some of us refused to listen. “We’re going to play without fear. We’re going to hold nothing back. We’re going to make some memories,” Ben Stokes wrote before the start. “Hopefully, the result is that we take the urn back, but the most important thing is that, whatever happens, you will be entertained.”
Of course not everyone’s in cricket for entertainment. Winning’s their thing. “Not in our environment,” Stuart Broad said at the start of the series. “It’s about bucket hats and enjoying it.” Those hats are all sold out, by the way, even the England and Wales Cricket Board’s managing director, Rob Key, can’t get his hands on a spare one for his kids. A couple of enterprising locals have been flogging knockoffs for a tenner outside the ground this week. Maybe the 2023 Ashes is, as Ethan Coen said about Miller’s Crossing, best understood as “a story about men in hats”. Ben Duckett says he wants to launch his own line, Duckett’s buckets. No one knows if he’s joking.
Well, England have done it the other way before. Back at the start of the last decade they treated the game as a matter of life and death. Andy Flower took them on boot camps in the Black Forest, had them haul bricks up into the mountains and belt each other with boxing gloves. They got all the way to the top of the world rankings. Then they blew up on tour in Australia and their best young quick had to go home because the stress meant he couldn’t even bowl any more, and their No 3 batsman developed such severe performance anxiety that he couldn’t even put a tracksuit on without being triggered.
This team have their own vulnerabilities. In Duckett, they have an opener who embarrassed himself so badly on his debut tour that he spent years in the wilderness pretending to be someone else. Their No 3, Moeen Ali, retired from Test cricket two years ago because he felt so jaded. All four of their fast bowlers are in bits. Their spinner, Jack Leach, who hasn’t even played in this series, has Crohn’s disease. Their captain, Stokes, has been taking medication for his mental health.
All of them slogged through the pandemic, same as the rest of us. Only they spent theirs shut up in hotels, away from their families, shuttling around in planes and buses to play games in empty stadiums. Sport is supposed to be fun, if it’s anything and, for years, English Test cricket was anything but. Now everyone’s wearing bucket hats and baseball caps and bandanas and bowling rockets and grinning while they bash sixes over midwicket.
England have made mistakes these past few weeks. They have played poor shots and dropped catches, their preparation was a muddle, they got some of their selections wrong. You can pick over their declaration on the first day at Edgbaston, ask if they should have picked a spinner at Lord’s, whether they should have let Jonny Bairstow bat on so long on Friday afternoon at Old Trafford. Or you can think about Joe Root’s reverse-scoop off Scott Boland and the way Stuart Broad got Marnus Labuschagne with that outswinger at Edgbaston, how Stokes’ blazed those sixes into the Mound Stand at Lord’s and Mark Wood bowled faster than light at Headingley.
Or Zak Crawley’s drive. Or Bairstow’s pull. Or any of the rest of it, and you can ask yourself why we play sport, what you want from watching it and which bits of all you will remember years from now.
In the meantime, a horse called Bazball won the 2.30 at Bath on Wednesday. On Friday the cycling website Rouleur described Matej Mohoric’s win on stage 19 of the Tour de France as Bazball cycling. The Guardian’s Larry Elliott is forecasting the rise of Bazball economics . In the Times, Chris Eubanks went down playing Bazball tennis in the quarter-finals at Wimbledon. The International Financing Review says the Bank of England needs to take a Bazball approach to interest rates before the pound tanks.
There will be a time when we look back and wonder what the hell all this was about, when, years ahead, Duckett’s wife is going to ask him if he’s ever going to get those boxes of leftover bucket hats out of the shed. But before all that, there’s one more week of this series left to enjoy. And if you’re holding up the wall then you’re missing the point.
