IAs the final moments arrived at the Sydney Cricket Ground, with the day, the match and the tour seeming to seep around the edges and melt away a little under a harsh white January sun, it seemed fitting that Ben Stokes would finish this Ashes series that is still standing, but only just.
At the very least, it was a suitably slapstick final session for a scattered, holiday-like audience. Australia powered their way to a victory total of 160, narrowly avoiding falling pianos and dangling from giant bell towers along the way.
It also felt fitting that the endgame would revolve around England’s tried and tested short and wide master plan, a series that will stick in the mind like an endless meme of an English seam being cut at right angles to a distant crowing border.
In the midst of this, Stokes spent the day at first slip, nursing his newly sustained groin injury, a cricketer who is essentially a hat at this stage, a collection of splints nailed together and a grimace. Again, it’s no surprise that Stokes grimaces, is stricken, and cringes in pain. Unless specifically stated otherwise, as a rule it should be assumed that Stokes is always grimacing, stricken and wincing in pain.
Cricket requires an all-day public persona. Stokes has his own version, a kind of performative doom, a showmanship of pain, like the hero in a Western who clutches his chest and staggers slowly backward through the saloon doors, but does so for six hours, from mid-morning to the afternoon shadows.
Australia will do this to you. The Adelaide Advertiser published an article midway through the third Test about the ‘captaincy killer’ tradition of an Ashes tour, sniffing blood, collapsing and collapsing.
Positives, then: Even after a bitter defeat, and England have been truly weak on this tour, ground into dust by an exhausted Australia, Stokes has not disintegrated. It was also a grueling six weeks in new ways. The first terminal online Ashes. The first 24-hour content tour. Seventeen days of real cricket in the 67 days I was in Australia, all consumed by incessant rolling chatter, screen rot and brain chatter, urgent non-events, headline non-events.
Stokes spoke at one point about having the urge to throw his phone into a river. Well, why not? This should be a consideration on future tours. England seemed completely unprepared for this refined form of exhaustion, brutalized by the experience of simply existing in Australia.
But no one seems prepared for anything here, during an Ashes series so rushed and sloppy that you half expected to look down and see that both teams have taken to the field with their pajama bottoms sticking out of the hem of their white shirts.
At the end, a few things are clear. Bazball is over. It’s goodbye to all that. The England and Wales Cricket Board’s three-year plastic branding exercise is over. There has been danger. Transcendental game states have been achieved and then misplaced. The optics of the wellness brand, the jawline, tattoos, man feelings, feet on the balcony rail… it all feels not only dated, but also terminally unpleasant.
An atmosphere is ultimately just an atmosphere. And this was a chimera, a rebadge, the snarl of a manufactured Japanese punk band. It worked for a while, because the talent and the single founding idea were both real.
It was fun for a while. We will always have the chasers, the creative captain, backed by some all-time cricketers in their last flush. Bazball will always live on in our minds and hearts. Oh, for a few years it will be considered passé and ridiculous. People will laugh at the golf obsession, saving cricket and Ben Duckett at the disruptive energy. But we had nothing to do with that and still loved Bazball. It has to come back someday. We can only hope that this will be true in our lifetimes.
And yes, about half of that is probably true. But the only important element at this point is that Stokes wants to stay, and he will stay. For starters, he has explicitly allied himself with Brendon McCullum, out of loyalty and perhaps also political considerations.
McCullum should still go now. Not only was the planning sloppy, his one superpower, which took the pressure off, demonstrably failed in Perth and Brisbane. McCullum may get a reprieve depending on his willingness to work with more structure around him. But is this even desirable? Is Baz with brains no longer Baz at all? Why ask the man whose authentic self never learns, never looks around, to learn and look around?
Of all the people in the sniper’s crosshairs, Rob Key looks the most vulnerable. Directors must actually manage and direct. Too many details have been glossed over. England’s Test, white-ball, Lions and Under-19 teams are all underperforming in a fit of cliqueyness and blurred lines. Firing the person at the top rarely solves much. The real shortcomings are of a profound structural nature. But this in itself is also a huge problem. Someone needs to be held accountable here. There must be consequences. English cricket, and indeed England itself, must at least try to be something different.
Stokes isn’t the problem here either. The captaincy has been a bit flat, held hostage by some pretty wild bowling, but his playing has been good. Stokes is now arguably England’s best bowler, with 42 Test wickets at 24 since December 2024. At 34, his batting has disappeared a bit. His 10 innings in Australia included scores of 6, 2, 2, 5, 0, 1, five dismissals at Mitchell Starc’s toe-searing pace. Maybe Stokes is actually Chris Woakes these days.
But none of the obvious failures are his. No real practice matches. Catch your very first pink ball in a Test match. Cricket as a tech-bro style life hack, all shortcuts and eat-this-one-superfood voodoo. This is on McCullum and Key.
There are two problems for Stokes 2.0. Sporting eras just get out of the way. And no England captain has ever embodied such a profound way of playing, being and speaking. Every prospective coach or manager will have to refine and supplement this. Stokes also seemed a little crazy at times. He has blinked at key points on this tour, been inconsistent in his reporting and seemed on the verge of wrapping up his own project.
Ollie Pope, for example, has reconfigured his entire sporting identity into a kind of pressure-shifting danger-monger, and he has been told that this is the basis for selection; then dropped as Stokes bats like the skipper of a snow-bound ghost ship, icicles dripping from his beard, feet rooted.
The mid-tour “weak men” talk was perhaps an attempt to drip some kind of emergency midseason mastic into an environment that had become limp and unquestionable. But these are the parts that English cricket will give him to work with, the trajectory kids.
And it is here that Stokes faces his biggest problem. He wants to rebuild, create something substantial. The problem is that the England team represents nothing. English cricket has no substance. It reflects no culture and expresses no vision other than high-end gloss and money for TV rights. This is more evident than ever in Australia, where cricket is truly the national summer sport.
While English cricket has long since been reeded, deflated and atomised. It is a private party, a silent disco for a small and privileged minority. The England team at least expresses a grain of truth, which is that the sport exists most vibrantly in private schools and on private grounds. We are the hollow men. We are the weak men. We are probably from Cranleigh, Weybridge and Clapham High Street.
We can now conduct an in-depth review. But which roots, which branches? Even the month of August is sold out. The Overton window of what the ECB can do to improve its sport is shrinking.
The Ashes will continue to spin in their own pristine space. People still come to the site and listen to the TV broadcasts in record numbers. There are useful things the ECB could do. Market the product properly. Take part in county cricket again because at the end of the day this is it, this is what you have.
English cricket still has great resources. It is time to maintain the home, to care for the home, to respond to the lessons of one’s own reports of elitism and alienation. But for all the heat, noise and color, this is a battle that in many ways feels like it’s already lost.
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