Frankly, it’s just not Bazball, old boy. On a febrile, toxic, at times mildly hallucinogenic day at Lord’s the cricketers of England and Australia produced one of the most obscurely rancorous days of high summer sport seen in this country.
Australia’s players were barracked by MCC members as they walked into the pavilion at the lunch break, with reports of “physical contact” initiated by the red-trousered ultras. The Lord’s crowd booed and jeered across four gruelling hours from midday to the close of play, a level of hostility that has surely never been witnessed inside this most mannered of environments, a place where a day’s cricket can often feel less like elite sport, more like a garden party that got out of hand.
Statements were fired out by the Australia team and an apology offered by a deeply embarrassed MCC, an institution that has for two hundred years presented itself as the embodiment of starchy-collared Englishness and a (strictly localised) sense of fair play. All that was really missing was a furious diplomatic cable and threat to take the next steamship back to Sydney.
In the best cricketing tradition of behavioural etiquette, the entire occasion turned on the exact timing of a man in a hat saying the word “over”, while another man prodded a patch of manicured north London clay with a piece of wood.
The moment that sparked the ill feeling occurred shortly before 1pm with England chasing victory on the final day and the captain, Ben Stokes, batting with Jonny Bairstow. Cameron Green bowled an uneventful final ball of his over to Bairstow, who briefly grounded his bat behind his crease and walked down the pitch towards his batting partners.
As he did so Australia’s wicketkeeper Alex Carey rolled the ball at the stumps, knocked the bails off and appealed. The umpire Ahsan Raza had not yet, as is the custom, called “over” to signify the end of that passage of play. Australia chose to enforce the strict liability option of appealing for Bairstow’s dismissal as England’s batter incorrectly assumed the over was complete and the ball dead.
Bairstow was given out after a review to the off-field umpire; and correctly so on the rules of cricket. At which point: enter the unwritten rules. As Stokes leaned on his bat and exchanged angry words with his opponents, as the crowd booed and roared, Bairstow was forced to trudge off, visibly steaming with rage.
The issue here lies with the ever-nebulous notion of the spirit of the game. On the one hand cricket does involve a great deal of walking up and down, of waiting, of non-play between the play. The unwritten rules would suggest this was by that point such a moment, that breaking the stumps was a cheap shot, unrelated to the skill of the bowler, or any idea of seeking an advantage in the game.
Australia’s captain, Pat Cummins, had the option to withdraw the appeal and call Bairstow back, with time to consider the optics. On the other hand there is a reason why the umpire calls over, mainly so that everyone present knows the over is over (and hopefully US readers, in particular, are still following the action at this point). And under the rules Bairstow was simply out.
It is the latest in a line of cricket controversies involving the spirit of the game. Here is a sport that takes place in white trousers and a collared shirt, where breaking for a cup of tea at 3.45pm is entirely non-negotiable, which is in many ways held together by its baroque notions of ritual and custom. But the spirit of the game is also a complex issue, mired in the dead hand of English colonialism, in notions of control and behavioural diktat, of distinguishing between People Like Us, the white-flannelled forces of order and the hordes beyond the boundary edge.
Either way Bairstow was out at Lord’s. And from that point, for all the rage, the jeers, the chants of “Same old Aussies, always cheating” from an unusually unbound fifth-day Lord’s crowd, England were always likely to lose this match against Australia’s world Test champion team.
But not before further extraordinary drama, as Stokes still had time to produce one of the greatest feats of batting witnessed on an English field, an innings of 155 powered by extreme skill, brutal hitting and above all a sense of rage.
- Download the Guardian app from the iOS App Store on iPhone or the Google Play store on Android by searching for 'The Guardian'.
- If you already have the Guardian app, make sure you’re on the most recent version.
- In the Guardian app, tap the Menu button at the bottom right, then go to Settings (the gear icon), then Notifications.
- Turn on sport notifications.
Stokes is already a captivating figure, perhaps the first elite athlete at the peak of his game to combine on-field success with speaking openly and publicly about depression and mental health problems. Revered both for his emotional honesty and his sporting brilliance, Stokes and England’s head coach, Brendon McCullum, have engineered something else in the past year, a new approach to Test cricket known informally as “Bazball”, which prizes self-expression, disruptive tactics and an idea of the cricket team reimagined as a forum for supportive male friendship.
At times the Bazball dynamic has felt like a shot in the arm, a challenge to the old structures of this cobwebbed sport; at others like a very public all-male support group, or simply a response to the fact the older, longer format is now dying in real time, outmanoeuvred by the more lucrative world of the Indian Premier League, the franchise world of T20.
Here Stokes produced a combination of old and new forms, a hundred of startling skill and innovative hitting, driven to a rare pitch of brilliance by his obvious anger at Bairstow’s dismissal. But despite his heroics England were always likely to fall short. They will now travel to Leeds for the third Test 2-0 down in a five-match series and facing a first home Ashes defeat since 2001.
