England’s Inner Ring could end up being their downfall

The England cricket team is facing a situation unprecedented in 149 years as they go into the first Test match of the summer against New Zealand on Thursday. The cricket followers of the nation have come to view the whole lot of them with genuine dislike. They haven’t lost the room: they’ve lost the nation.

Not because they lost the Ashes series in Australia: one team after another has managed that without arousing the same sort of eye-rolling contempt. What’s more, Bazball is not the cause: only the most significant symptom.

It’s only partly to do with the four-day stag-do in Noosa, clearly the best organised part of the trip; and only partly to do with the covering-up of Harry Brooks’s big night out.

The root cause is much deeper. It has to be if it is to alienate the cricketlovers of a cricket-living nation.

Many England teams have failed without arousing derision. When the West Indies were beating everyone in the 1980s, Ian Botham, David Gower and Allan Lamb were still admired. When England went from disaster to disaster in the 1990s, we blamed the system while cheering for defiant cricketers like Mike Atherton.

But this lot… how has the England Test cricket team managed to estrange its following so comprehensively?

The answer is in CS Lewis, the man who wrote the Narnia books. It’s not in the judgments of Aslan but an oration Lewis gave at King’s College, London in 1944. He called it The Inner Ring.

There was an Inner Ring at my school: no doubt at everybody else’s school too. The in-group. Always making a great parade of their togetherness. My lot sat in a tight bunch in every single lesson. They had no time for the rest of us. Every Monday morning they formed a great shouty gathering as they rehashed the weekend’s excitements. They were self-enclosed and all-repelling.

The rest of us went through roughly the same sequence of responses: envy of their tightness, an ambition to be accepted by them followed by the useful realisation that every in-group – from the Jockey Club to the pool school at the Red Lion – is defined by those it excludes.

Lewis spells out the “delicious sense of secret intimacy” and points out that “your genuine Inner Ring exists for exclusion. There’d be no fun if there weren’t outsiders.”

The England cricket team has made the rest of the world outsiders. Of course, they’re all right on their own, just as members of my school’s Inner Ring were fine if you bumped into them away from the rest. I couldn’t possibly feel a vestige of contempt for Ben Stokes or Joe Root – unless they were with the others.

Here’s Stokes before the Ashes. “Me and Baz” – and that’s enough to exasperate even before he got round to the point –“firmly believe if you create a tight-knit group not only on the field but off it, that’s going to help morale, particularly when you come to a series like this.”

Baz – the head coach Brendon McCullum – said that the series was all about “how connected, how united we can stay”. They never lost each other’s esteem. Just the cricket matches. And the esteem of everybody else. Lawrence Booth wrote as editor of Wisden that they “ran out of ideas and friends”.

That last word is the one that cuts deep. No fielding coach: mustn’t let an Outsider into the Inner Ring. No proper warm-up matches: us cool guys don’t need them, though Outsiders can’t be expected to understand that. “We can’t prepare how the has-beens mainly prepared in the past,” said Stokes. “The landscape of cricket has changed.”

We mustn’t forget that initially, Bazball was a triumph. Now it’s a self-evident truth that a shock weapon only works when it’s shocking, but because the tactic defines the Inner Ring, it was followed to the point of witlessness.

Crucial moment: in the first Test in Perth, England managed to extend a narrow first-innings lead to 105 at the start of the second innings of a low-scoring match. One well-played session would secure the match and the advantage for the rest of the series. So they chucked it away in a welter of daft strokes… still convinced they were right and the rest of the world was wrong.

“If you get caught somewhere on the boundary or in the field, then who cares?” Harry Brook famously remarked. The England team has received the answer to that question, but I’m not convinced they were listening.

Any criticism from Outsiders must be wrong. As we go into the first Test of a new season, it seems that the Monday morning classroom babble is as loud as ever… and they haven’t noticed the rest of the school walking away, rolling our eyes.

Photograph by Gareth Copley/Getty Images