Leading them in is, of course, Brendon McCullum or Baz of Bazball, not Lurhmann, fame. They speak before being spoken to, with Ben Duckett championing the killer lines as he tends to do.
It’s all the trademark bluster we’ve come to expect. How England are paving the way. How they’re making cricket great again. How they are simply irresistible. How the rest of the world should credit England every time one of their batters hits a six or plays a shot in anger. How Bazball will cure us of all the cynicism that ails us.
But hang on, maybe he won’t use the term Bazball because, remember, the English players and Baz himself are not fans of it. It’s we who have thrust it upon them. They are simply having fun.
Right about then, though, someone in this mythical saloon goes, “Oh, so how’s it all working out for you guys? Win much?”
And here come the excuses. This is where this mythical watering hole makes way for reality. There are plenty of examples to choose from when it comes to highlighting the near delusion in the way the English players at times talk about their style of play or their goals as a team.
Just look at the past month where England lost seven out of their eight white-ball matches in India. From Harry Brook blaming the smog in Kolkata for not being able to sight the variations of the Indian spinners to Duckett coolly declaring that he didn’t care about losing the ODI series “3-0” till the time they beat India in the Champions Trophy final. None of it made sense, especially once the comical post-mortems commenced, especially those claiming that England were lazy and didn’t bother training between matches.
Though largely farcical, the stern telling from some former players on England’s approach in India was symbolic of how the novelty of Bazball has worn off, even for some of its staunchest supporters. And how it’s started to get on their nerves like it did with every other team and their fans who’ve had to deal with it in the last two years. It’s again not always in response to what happens on the field but generally around the commentary that comes out of the English dressing room.
For, let’s face it, they should ideally be favourites on paper in their Champions Trophy opener against Australia in Lahore on Saturday. You look at the make-up of their team and there are match-winners strewn from top to bottom, with bat and ball. They have one of the greatest in history to ever lace a cricketing boot in Joe Root along with a generational talent in Brook. In addition to white-ball royalty in Jos Buttler and Adil Rashid alongside some of the scariest ball-hitters in Phil Salt and Liam Livingstone.
Not to forget the crux of what will be their Ashes attack later this year led by Jofra Archer and including Mark Wood, Gus Atkinson and Brydon Carse. All that against an under-strength Australian bowling attack.
The fact that they have won less than 40 per cent of their matches across formats in the last 18 months is baffling.
They should be winning. They should be dominating. Instead, they seem so fixated on vibes, at least in the way they talk about themselves, that you wonder if they’ve lost touch with reality at times. Vibes over actual results is an attitude which in the sporting world sadly doesn’t come with a long shelf-life.
The wonderful English cricket writer Barney Ronay called it a “death cult” in a recent column in The Guardian and described some of the comments that you hear from their players as “seductively meaningless mottos”.
While their white-ball form has been woeful since the last World Cup, they also finished near the bottom of the World Test Championship table. Only to have captain Ben Stokes sound rather dismissive of the WTC concept, even going as far as to suggest that he didn’t quite get the memo on the complex points system.
They were poor in the 50-over World Cup and scratched their way around to make the semi-finals of the T20 World Cup before being blanked by India. That led to them parting ways with Australian coach Matthew Mott. And to more Baz. The total Baz takeover.
Over time, the delusion has been contagious enough to infect their women’s team. English teams, men and women collectively, have lost 16 of their last 18 matches across all formats in six weeks.
That is while the England women’s coach, Jon Lewis, was roundly ridiculed for some of his comments on how it was the cultural differences, outdoors lifestyle and Bondi Beach that had to do with his team being blanked in the women’s Ashes.
This was after promising an entertaining style of cricket, which never really came to the fore.
To England’s credit, what they do and say is entertaining to everyone else but not always in the way they’d like it to be. But it’s their lack of awareness, especially at a time when their win-loss ratio is so not in their favour, that is amusing.
I remember an English journalist friend of mine very matter-of-factly telling me in late 2023, “Look, Australia cannot keep winning the same way they have been for decades on home soil, where they grind opponents down. They’re going to have to adopt the English way, or they’ll start losing viewers, and their fans will lose interest.”
Incidentally, Australia are coming off a very successful home Test summer, having managed to regain the Border Gavaskar Trophy in a blockbuster series, which shattered most records in terms of fans coming through the turnstiles and also fans watching the product on television and all other screens. And save probably for the Sam Konstas-Jasprit Bumrah showdown on the morning of Boxing Day, it was all based on hardcore traditional Test cricket, the way it’s existed largely in Australia for decades.
It’s funny how it works with the English. It’s like at some level they take more out of how much talk of Bazball annoys the Aussies rather than in winning matches against the other countries.
But unless they start turning things around on the field, probably by firstly beating Australia in Lahore and then going deep in the Champions Trophy, the joke is on them. For, the fact is that we could all come up with our own analogies to poke fun of them at the moment.
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Imagine a classic saloon scene from a Western. It doesn’t have to be a good film. Just think of trigger-happy, big-talking outlaws. All the teams at the Champions Trophy are already quenching their thirst when England swagger in, the double doors swinging back and forth, wearing their Bazball hats with pride.