It lives. It breathes. It walks around. Although, it should be said, with a limp, and a wheeze, and a telling sense of glassiness behind the eyes.
As England’s World Cup staggers on into Ahmedabad for Saturday’s meeting with Australia there is a temptation to describe the remaining acts of their title defence – the defence that asked not to be called a defence; and which has now duly achieved its wish – as dead games, dead rubbers, a week long jazz funeral cortege for England’s age of white‑ball supremacy.
In reality this is an occasion still throbbing with zombified life. Not to mention, in its staging and basic geography, one of the more poignant outings in the fevered modern history of English cricket. Welcome to England’s World Cup defence 2023 the endgame: day‑night of the living dead.
It should be said that England are still technically alive at this World Cup. The stats model gives them a 4% chance of reaching the semi-finals from the current strategic basecamp at the bottom of the table. That same flicker of the dials also offers Australia the mouthwatering opportunity to assist in knocking England out of not one but two ICC competitions at a single stroke. Defeat in Ahmedabad would leave England needing to win both remaining games in India to have a chance of qualifying for the next Champions Trophy in 2025.
If this feels like a minor detail, just another flower on the casket at this stage, it is also a significant note given the ECB’s administrators failed to register this was a live issue until midway through the tournament. Really it is the sheer joined-up scale of England’s poverty in India, a World Cup where they haven’t just been bad but superbad, that speaks to a sense of wider forces in play.
No England team has ever lost so many games at a World Cup. No England team has ever reached the stage of outright tournament bottom-feeders. No England team has ever made the startling nosedive from 50-over champions to one of the worst iterations at any World Cup – and better still done so without any obvious process, warning signs, change of approach, or indeed the slightest clue as to how this could have happened.
“We’ve been crap,” was Ben Stokes’s best guess in the bowels of the Narendra Modi Stadium on the eve of Saturtoday’s game. There is at least a ring of truth about this, and refreshingly so given the haze of bafflement inside the England bubble, the feeling that what we have here is not just the death of an era, but a mystery story, an unsolved whodunnit.
But zoom out a little, take in the wider surrounds, and the sense of something a bit more joined-up starts to loom through the mist. For a start there is a delicious sense of theatre in England and Australia meeting in Gujarat. Victorian overlords of the colonial summer game: welcome to the new seat of power.
This is, of course, the most nationalistic of World Cups, a coronation not just for India’s assumption of cricketing power, but for Narendra Modi’s assimilation of the national team and the national sport as an engine of his own politics.
Ahmedabad is the capital of Modi’s home state Gujarat, and a seat of power for his BJP party and for the BCCI, headed up by the remarkably precocious 35-year-old administrator Jay Shah, who, in a striking coincidence, also happens to be the son of Modi’s oldest political ally.
The stadium is Modi’s own imperial circus, the largest sports ground in the world after the Rungrado 1st of May Stadium, in North Korea. There has already been a comparison drawn between this ODI World Cup and Qatar 2023, with the suggestion it should be condemned in the same terms, as the sportswashing machine of an ambitious and, in parts, brutal political regime.
Modi’s World Cup is more election rally than global power play. But international cricket – in effect, all cricket everywhere – has been a powerful engine in selling his aspirational Hindu nationalism. Ahmedabad is by extension the home of the global game now, the Modi stadium a kind of Gujarati Lord’s.
For England’s players, gamely marching out once again in their fraying uniforms, Saturday may just feel a bit like a hazing ritual for the world order. Behold the shadows of your former glory. This thing lives here now.
Little wonder they might look a little weary. On Friday morning Stokes stuck manfully to the line that every England game is a special occasion. He livened up, briefly, at mention of Mohammed Shami’s superlative bowling against Sri Lanka the night before, but had no response whatsoever to a question about “anything funny or nice” that had happened in the tournament to date. (“Err … I wasn’t prepared for that question”).
On England’s fall from champions to backmarkers he had no answers at all: “If we knew what’s gone wrong we’d be able to fix it.” That sense of shared bafflement has been the company line to date. It feels telling in itself. This team has thrived on group-think, shared methods, a sealed environment. When you’re winning this take you all in the same direction with a wonderful sense of clarity. When you’re losing it can do the same thing.
From outside that bubble it isn’t hard to see why England have struggled. The team is basically the same team, just a little weaker and four years older. Preparation was sparse. Injured players were selected. Harry Brook, the only A-grade talent to have actually emerged in the past four years, has been successfully mucked about with.
The batters seem to have forgotten how they won the last World Cup by retaining the ability for critical thinking, going smarter rather than harder in difficult moments. Perhaps a more experienced and authoritative coach would have had the confidence to rip a few things up before the tournament, to sense the need for a defibrillation rather than fingers crossed and more of the same.
But it would still be wrong to describe England’s collapse here as an aberration, a black swan event, the product of human error. Because in many ways this is the most perfectly representative of England teams, a far more accurate barometer of domestic cricket’s base level than the champions of 2019.
The White-Ball Revolution era has always wanted to mean something. There was a great deal of talk four years ago about legacy, about not just growing but saving the game (these guys: always with the saving) of providing some kind of genuine ignition point.
In reality that tournament left almost no imprint beyond the giddy memories of a one-off team and a mind-bending final. England’s World Cup winners were the ECB’s equivalent of the Team GB Olympic aesthetic, the successful funnelling of resources and energy into the elite tier, gold medals as public relations, a way of plastering a skein of good news across the structures beneath.
If the team has failed to refresh itself in the years since this should come as no surprise because that success spoke to nothing but itself, the moment, elite husbandry of a one-off generation. There has been no actual watering of the roots, no coherent pathway created. How do you make another Jofra Archer? Or another Eoin Morgan? Adil Rashid emerged in spite not because of the wider culture around him.
For all the talk, the PR initiatives, the glossy montages, four years on from those pre-Covid days cricket in England is still a shrinking summer pastime, largely invisible to the unconverted, walled up in its private garden. If anything it is more remote now, more niche. The real issue for the ECB is not that the England team is in a state of chaos, but that the wider world really doesn’t seem to care that the England team is in a state of chaos; that what we have here is a binfire in a vacuum.
If there are no easy answers to exactly how and why this team’s decline has been so steep, then perhaps this is because the only answers are hard answers, structural answers, answers that speak more clearly to the way the sport, like the players, has been squeezed so thin.
For now this England team is good enough and angry enough to rouse itself for Australia in Ahmedabad. There is still a chance to dress the corpse of that title defence, to trim its beard for the wake, to add a few well chosen words to the eulogy, and to enjoy, in the heat of the home of cricket, the passing of another torch.
