Tea at the MCG and reality has long since started fraying at the edges. Jacob Bethell has, to this point, faced 14 balls in the series, more concept art than cricketer. England need 98 runs to win a first Ashes Test since 2011 on a wicket which has bamboozled 32 batters in the previous 10 hours’ play. You are the youngest player on the pitch and your tour highlight to date was a video seemingly showing you out on the town while dancing to YMCA. Your nation’s shattered pride and tender hope rests on your 22-year-old shoulders. What do you do?
Reverse scoop Scott Boland with your first ball after the break, then caress the next through the covers, apparently. Top score for the innings with an unburdened, match-defining ballet routine of a 40. Debunk all conventional wisdom about match practice and hard yards and necessary suffering.
Bethell is everything this England team stands for; trusting vibes and good lads over evidence and experts, the renunciation of the county game, all talent and positive mindset and in the right shapes. He has played three first-class matches this year, and one Test, in which he had batted at No 6. He has still not scored a first-class hundred.
And yet Bethell’s Ashes record is now one from one, seemingly blessed by both talent and timing. It took Ben Stokes and Joe Root four tours and copious misery to win here. Bethell needed two days.
Despite everything, this is now England’s best tour Down Under since 2011, their first win here in 5,468 days, a purging and vindication. The past six weeks also hurt more than any of the last four visits and any success from here only makes the waste look more egregious, not least in Ollie Pope’s protracted inclusion and Josh Tongue’s delayed introduction to the series. This anarchic victory only deepened the confusion at how England got here in the first place, how what had long felt like well-sourced optimism was reframed as folly and delusion in the face of three wildly different but equally chastening defeats.
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But amid the chaos were flickering signs that Bazball’s much-heralded demise has allowed its exponents to get on with playing the cricket they’ve always been trying to, otherwise known as Bazball, which was really only ever “play good shots when they can be played and don’t be too hard on yourself”, cricket’s Big Beat Manifesto. The fourth innings assignment was everything they’ve spent the past four years preparing for – swing hard, swing fast, don’t stop ‘til you get enough. This is what they do. It is still unclear whether it’s all they do.
For all the easy excuses that Australia utilised a largely second-choice bowling attack, that this was as close to a dead rubber as Test cricket gets, the pressure on England far outweighed that on their hosts. The pitch was unchangingly poor for both teams and Australia were trying to win all the same. England just handled themselves better with bat and ball, also missing their two best bowlers and any semblance of a frontline spinner. To discredit that would be petty and bitter.
Maybe what they needed all along was Bazball without the name and noise, or even without the Baz
Victory proves the emotional seams of this group are holding together despite everything they have endured, a genuinely impressive leadership feat, validation that the positive environment stuff largely works. Stuart Broad called the 2020-21 series “that painful an experience that it didn’t count in my own brain”. The Pomnishambles of 2013-14 made Jonathan Trott go home with “stress-related illness” and retired Graeme Swann mid-series. Rob Key spoke earlier this week about the tendency for half of the squad to turn on the coach or captain in Ashes defeats, which genuinely doesn’t appear to have happened. If anything, these players worship Stokes and Brendon McCullum too fervently, trust them too deeply.
Stokes featured on the back page of most Australian papers on Christmas Eve having caught one in the unmentionables while training, as neat a metaphor for his tour to date as anything else. This is a man who, for everything he has tried, for every new well he has dug, has spent the past six weeks repeatedly taking a Kookaburra to the balls. Still possessing the conviction to promote Brydon Carse to No 3, a deeply insane swing that it’s hard to argue didn’t work, or at least help, is testament to the man. There is little question he deserves this win as player and captain.
The public bloodlust will at least temporarily quieten, but if there are to be changes, they should come above Stokes, one or both of Key and McCullum. This series’ most obvious problems are the direct result of having two vibesmongers in charge who don’t appear to have the patience or skillset to book an adequate pre-series preparation venue, or stop their players from being filmed appearing blackout drunk. Maybe a designated adult in the room could tell McCullum that nonchalance is not a coherent plan, that we’re all a bit old to be too cool to take things seriously. How much he has actually impacted this squad, rather than just helped support and facilitate Stokes’s ideas, is somewhere between unclear and unprovable. Ollie Pope and Shoaib Bashir increasingly look like this tour’s only form-based casualties. Ben Duckett, who batted here like a drunk trying to fend seagulls off his chips with an empty Pringles can, will return, still half of England’s best opening partnership since Sirs Alastair Cook and Andrew Strauss.
Perhaps what England needed was a spiritual death to reset, to kill the Bazball chat for good, to relieve the pressure and expectation and narrative. Maybe what they needed all along wasn’t Bazball with brains, it was Bazball without the name and noise, or even without the Baz.
Little is being made of the fact this might well be both Stokes and Root’s last antipodean tours. If McCullum goes, his replacement would still build a batting attack for the next Ashes around Harry Brook, Jamie Smith and Bethell. The most talented young English players suit aggressive cricket, as their successors almost inevitably will, given their multi-format educations. Even if you kill the man, you are unlikely to kill the idea. But you might find someone better suited to realise it.
Three hours after play had finished, the England squad emerged into an empty MCG resplendent in its evening wear, armed with plastic chairs and beer, looking for all the world like a team still united. They travel to Sydney with the opportunity to finish this series 3-2. Bazball is dead. Long live Bazball.
Photograph by Martin Keep / AFP via Getty Images